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Thursday, October 21, 2010

I love how Autumn feels.

It feels like how ginger snaps taste. How whiskey tastes with a touch of Ravel.
Sharp, crisp. Burning, yet soothing.
Autumn looks like fire, a world constantly ablaze, laughing.
Earth and sky lit up, waiting — almost tauntingly — for winter's frost to come douse its flames.

Autumn smells like you.
Like Dial soap and dried, crunchy leaves that I would pull out of my hair
after my sister and I raked them into piles as best we could with broken rakes on our brown lawn
and then threw our small, excited bodies eagerly into them as if we had waited the whole year
just to embrace Autumn.


I haven't raked leaves in years.
There aren't many around here. There's only cement, dilapidated buildings, silent evenings, and lots and lots of due dates.

Besides, I don't have a rake.

I only have lined paper and a pen. Piles of books, a bottle of brandy. Dusty, baroque records that I can't play. Empty coffee mugs and pictures of Paris plastered on my yellow walls,

and a right-side brain burning like leaves in the autumn,
fighting against the sanity, or insanity, that surrounds it
like the blue, white, and red soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War.

3 comments:

  1. That's beautiful. Autumn is my favourite season and I wait the whole year just to embrace Autumn as well.

    And I've never raked leaves in my entire life; our house was the only house on the street with no tree.

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  2. I love Autumn. I love the moisture in the air and the rain in the sky. And the falling of leaves. And I love how its never hot.

    ReplyDelete
  3. i stopped using lined paper this year. there's some magic (however little) in making your own lines flow across the page, creating order out of emptiness

    ReplyDelete

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