Leaves fall,
uncloaking the grand oak.
The cricket’s song
drifts away with the breeze.
But the delicate Japanese maple
remains glorious and resplendent.
*
Lying under a charcoal sky,
leaves falling like memories of time past,
I turn my head and see you
in the distance.
You-the ruby-haired queen
standing on the rampart
watching battle weary soldiers fall.
And I understand hope.
Originally posted on Quirk N Jive on May 22, 2015
The hill
Four houses
Forest behind
Fields ahead
A dead end
The horizon
A prison
That place
Autumn
Dead leaves
Bare trees
My mother
Speaking in tongues
Secrets and stories
Legends of the dead
Bones in the woods
Sounds in the night
An insomniac child
Wide awake
Midnight rapping on the door
Something crashing to the floor
The dog atop the stairs
Snarling
The house next door
Looming
Once inside
A cavernous red room
A feeling of doom
Something wrong
Innocence knows
A dry fountain in back
Some toads
Chirping of crickets
Honking of geese
The noisy silence of death
and demons
Peaking in windows
Smashing down gates
The song of that place
On the hill
Where the Warden’s house stood.
*
Just the other night
I visited that house
In my dream
The red room
The living room
The basement door
I saw it all
All that dwelled there then
All that dwells there now
In my dreams
Of that house
On that hill
In that place
Where dead leaves fall
in the eerie silence
of a haunted past
This poem was originally posted in October 2015 as “The Neighbor’s House.”
Dark, Light
Cruel, Kind
The juxtaposition of the golden maple with this gray November sky-
the leaves illuminated, not by light
not by anything other than the contrast between her and the ashen curtain in front of which she stands.
Like this long ride through the country to see you.
The fear of what lies ahead.
The sadness of what is.
Perhaps it is the contrast between what I see
and what I feel
that makes this landscape so beautiful
that makes these trees so magical
that brings the awareness that in the darkness
there is light.
There is something about the season of fall that lends itself to writing. I can think of many reasons why this is, but, for me, it is the quiet.
Summer with her symphony of fireworks and lawn mowers has ended, and now we are left with the gentle whispers of crickets as they pass from this place to another. We are now left in the stillness of a season that comes between the summer’s obligatory happiness and the winter holidays’ forced merriment.
Autumn seems to grant the writer permission to feel deeply and express the broad range of emotions that we sometimes subconsciously suppress. It allows us to be present amidst the great beauty of amber and gold leaves as they fall to the ground, to sense the nervous excitement of the animals as they rush to gather the food required for survival during the long winter and to feel the sadness that comes from the loss of life that once thrived in the warmth and light of summer.
I hope that this fall yields you a bountiful harvest of writing-poems, stories, songs, posts, articles. For me, throughout this month of November I will be posting new and older pieces inspired by the season.
Happy writing!
Fear finds you at night.
It rushes under your skin
and makes its way towards your heart
where it constricts,
slowly strengthening its grip
like a thread tied around a finger-
pulling, making it ache
until the finger pulsates.
The tip, increasing in size,
turns purple.
So the heart
caught in fear
pounds upon the door of sleep
and awakens you, the dreamer
who, finding yourself cold and wet,
must now decide whether or not to rise.
You must decide
whether you should try to rest in a dream where fear waits outside the gates of sleep
or awake to a nightmare
or, perhaps, awake to life.
You get up-coffee, face, teeth, dress.
You walk outside into a gray October morning,
quiet-but for the crickets chirping, singing their desperate song,
hoping that if their voices continue so too will they
or, if the song is beautiful enough, at least the memory of them will remain.
You see that the trees are losing their leaves
and you catch sight of one golden maple leaf
floating to the ground,
the curtain closing upon its final act.
You listen and -in the silence of the early morning-
you hear it land.
You feel the closure
that comes from hearing a last breath,
that comes from bearing witness to one reach his final resting place.
And you feel strong.
You are alive.
Still alive.
The quaint New England village
in mid-October.
Antique shops, country stores.
White-steepled churches
set against the backdrop
of fall’s spectacular display
of crimson and gold foliage.
And the old New England home.
Her porch adorned with cornstalks and pumpkins.
Her flowerbeds full of yellow and rust-colored mums.
Arrogantly she stands.
She knows her admirers.
How they delight in her unassuming
beauty.
So simple.
Tasteful.
Smart.
She leaves her admirers to wonder
whether she is listed in the registry
of historic homes.
No one
not even she
acknowledges that her charms will fade
with the dropping of the leaves.
*
Be patient.
Wait a bit.
Four weeks perhaps.
Then visit again.
This time
go on in.
Meet her.
Push open the door that doesn’t quite want to give.
She’s not easy, you know.
Hear the creak of the plank floor as you step inside.
Smell the mothballs
and the scent of doorknobs
touched too many times
by so many hands
that the odor
that’s permeated their surfaces
can never be removed.
Smell the faint aroma
of dried out pot roasts
from dinners that stole away days.
Feel the lifeless still
of 4:00
on a Sunday afternoon
in November.
Sit in the chair by the window
and see the world
from that filmy view.
The gray sky.
The skeleton trees.
Now, turn your gaze back inside
and watch the dust
dance
in the late autumn sun
that streaks tauntingly through the glass.
And watch
as a single particle
settles itself atop one of the many knickknacks
that sits lazily
upon the mantel.
Hear the clock.
Each tick
reminding you
of how very long
a day can be.
In the sickening stillness
feel the unbearable loneliness.
Catch your breath.
Breathe in deeply.
Push the air past
the knot
in your throat.
As you sit, feel the house.
The weight
of her past.
So close, really.
What’s 200 years?
Certainly not enough time
for the departed
to resign themselves
to their fate.
The hill
Four houses
Forest behind
Fields ahead
A dead end
The horizon
A prison
That place
Autumn
Dead leaves
Bare trees
My mother
Speaking in tongues
The flames of hell
The flame of the spirit
Secrets and stories
Legends of the dead
Bones in the woods
Sounds in the night
An insomniac child
Wide awake
Midnight rapping on the door
Something crashing to the floor
The dog atop the stairs
Snarling
The house next door
Looming
Once inside
A cavernous red room
A feeling of doom
Something wrong
Innocence knows
A dry fountain in back
Some toads
Chirping of crickets
Honking of geese
The noisy silence of death
The song to which demons dance
Peaking in windows
Smashing down gates
The song of that place
On the hill
Where the Warden’s house stood.
*
Just the other night
I visited that house
In my dream
The red room
The living room
The basement door
I saw it all
All that dwelled there then
All that dwells there now
In my dreams
Of that house
On that hill
In that place
Where dead leaves fall
in the eerie silence
of a haunted past
It astonishes me how one season can be both profoundly beautiful and profoundly sad. When I was ten years old my family moved from a small industrial city to prison housing in a rural farming community. At the time, my father was the assistant warden of a maximum security prison, and high level staff and their families were expected to live on the grounds. Although we made the move in late August, for me, my seven years there are frozen in autumn. Our home, one of four, was set upon a hill. In back of our house-forest. In front of our house-fields. And if you looked past those fields, you could see a medium security prison looming on the horizon. It was an isolating and lonely existence, and, no matter how beautiful the landscape was, for a child used to a neighborhood and city kids, it was, well, sad. In my memory the sky was always gray, the trees always bare and the ground always covered in a blanket of the decomposing remains of what was once vibrant foliage. What strikes me most, however, is the perennial sound of honking geese. Prior to our move, I think it is possible that I had never before heard geese much less seen them flying overhead in V formation. But there, in that place, geese were omnipresent, honking, flying overhead, reminding me that I was a stranger trapped in a place that they were escaping from, if not forever, at least for the impending winter.
As I have grown older, I have learned to truly appreciate and, in many ways, love the fall. Fall is now a time of beautiful traditions-apple and pumpkin picking, hiking and collecting leaves while watching beams of sunlight shoot through tree branches, already majestic and adorned in gold. I look to my children to teach me lessons in optimism. They jump for joy into piles of dead leaves while happily awaiting the first snow to arrive and cover naked branches in crystal that shimmers in the light of the winter moon.
I guess it’s a matter of age and perspective. It is so easy to allow deep sorrow born from past experience to rob us of the happiness that comes from enjoying the beauty of the life we now lead. For me, I prefer to march on through dead leaves and enjoy hearing them crunch underfoot as I move on ahead.
It is a strange irony that, as the leaves prepare to fall from their branches and crumble to dust, the world seems to come alive. Gone, finally, is the lethargy of long hot days.
We are moved by autumn’s enchantments.
The cool air takes on a particular scent unique to the fall. It is both hearty and sweet, a mix of pine, apples, leaves trampled underfoot and the lingering fragrance of summer flowers.
Our spirits stir with the shift of the season. We are moved by a feeling of excitment and a sense of foreboding. Now is the time when our creativity reemerges from the its long summer slumber when frivolity and amusement seemed to overtake and suppress our artistic urges.
Now is the time to feel comfortably conflicted. We cling onto life in the face of impending death. As we are overwhelmed by the magestic beauty of orange and crimson leaves, we are cognizant of what is yet to come. As winter closes in upon us, we look to the heavens and we are gifted with a shot of the sun’s glorious rays filtering through golden leaves and capturing fall’s ineffable beauty.
And, as we journey onward, we beseech our muses for inspiration so that we may find peace in creating during those long, dark days of winter.
Quirk N Jive 