Earth is Heavy and Full of Autumn

Today is the first official full day of autumn, Season of Hawthorne and Whitman and Thoreau. Shakespeare dubbed autumn "The time of year thou mayest in me behold," and I can feel the atmospherical tilt of the earth begin to crack open, can feel the wind begin to whip and flagellate against the brittle calcium of the trees, can feel the earnest crackle of the temperature plummet, can see car windows shielded in a thin film of morning frost, can see my breath whistling out of my mouth in a vaporous locomotive stream of carbon dioxide.

It is autumn. The feeling of Friday night and high school football games beaming against the intoxicating glint of a chalky field fraught with hormonally-fueled teenagers bearing helmets and shoulder pads in lieu of american armor. The thick, drapery of night pierced by the movie-screen forehead of the woman you are in love with, the cidery thick-ashy scent of a homecoming bonfire swirling smoke-signals off in the distance as you hold her close, sharing the same thermos or bottle, staring heavily into the same starry quilt looming above.

It is autumn. Political placards salute groomed yards. Expired bushels of leaves are raked into an abandoned funeral pyre. The sunsets seem to dissipate, offering the world a nuclear-tang; a refulgent orange glower before the lavender hue of dusk quietly errupts from the east and you realize that you are part of this planetary vessel--a vessel which pulsates and thrives and swoops through seasons. You realize that you are a part of this planetary bulb. That you are 93 million miles away from the spacial thermoculcear socket that cranks out life, cranks out every feeling you have ever known.

It is autumn. Season of pumpkins and gords, sallow cornhusks slaughtered on the side of the road, reaped and ploughed for harvest. Abandoned halloween candy splashed over sewer drains like a chirstened cornucopia. Christmas catalogues the size of Hindu Vedas stuffed into mail slits.

It is Autumn. Uncle Larry brews coffee at 4am on a Saturday before he loads his remington and drives his truck out lone Smithville road, quietly camouflaging his post, waiting for the sprinkle of deer to meander and trod, waiting , patiently, before the calloused swirl of his fingertip snaps the trigger and he hauls his hobby back home to his garage, gutting the carcass with the skill of a neaderthal artist.

It is autumn. A young boy who is seventeen discovers Whitman and writes sloppy poems. He wades his body out into the alphabetical pond of sound and experience. He writes about the creature he held the previous summer. Writes about the moment of self-discovery, writes stanza's the way he feels her body is composed, the way his heart is composed. He writes in sentences that reaches out of the frame of the page, sentences that kick free from the harnessed academic notation of convention and form, sentences that will somehow lead him into her gentle palms again, in a dimmed candle room, where he writes all alone, his heart carved like a rococo jack-o-lantern.

It is autumn. The northern hemipshere is chanting out its seasonal swan song and the sight of her body and the proximity of her flesh keeps your spirit peppermint tea warm through the thick evergreen descent of winter.