Celebrating November

The price of gold hovers around $1,750 an ounce.  But the gold that fills the landscape, glinting the hills, dressing the countryside, the streets, the lawns, is now raked up and bagged or left for the deer to walk on.  Blowing machines hum around town.  No longer obscured by leafy trees, road-side corners are easier to maneuver.  Low-lit afternoons reveal open spaces between the branches.

And in that low-light of even early afternoon, I walk beside the West River before the days become too cold and the wind whistling down the river, too fierce.  All is quiet except for a single crow and the inconsequential hum of cars.  Even the river is silent.  Only an occasional brown oak leaf floats along its placid, ripple-less sun-lit surface.  The corn field is now stubble.  If I were to paint what I see, I would get out tubes of raw sienna and raw umber.  A pewter grey for tree trunks and shadows.  All to render the prickles, twigs, fluff, seed heads, bare branches, bittersweet berries, dead curled leaves.

Back home, cup of tea in hand, I get out my poetry books.

November Night (Adelaide Crapsey 1878-1914)

Listen ...
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

Fall, Leaves, Fall (Emily Brontë 1818-1848)

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;
Lengthen night and shorten day;
Every leaf speaks bliss to me
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
I shall smile when wreaths of snow
Blossom where the rose should grow;
I shall sing when night's decay
Ushers in a drearier day.

And, in a more contemporary vein:

leaves

these cool blowy days
          rip time
shaking the garden bare above
shadows windful & aching with
          raw light
as whispers sit through moments
          gone
falling like my summer sleep

(I wrote that using those refrigerator poetry magnets)

Once above, now below