Fall
Oct 23 2020
It was a disappointing fall.
When it seemed every day was dull,
with that wet cold
that lodges in your bones
no matter what.
When the leaves all turned
the same drab brown,
and in just a single night
a heavy wind had taken them down.
When it was rain, mostly,
gumboots and slickers
and mud tracking in
with happily wagging dogs,
who are always that way
weather or not.
“Autumn” would have sounded bittersweet
all golden leaves and wood-smoke.
But “Fall” is Biblical,
the devil evicted from heaven
Adam expelled from Eden
Jericho's walls.
Yet either way
our fall from grace stops here,
landing on our feet
in winter's freshly fallen snow
and energizing cold.
Its short days
with darkness as a refuge,
decorative lights
and summer to look forward to.
Storm-stayed
by an arctic blizzard,
when the world is remade
and all its sins concealed.
When you emerge to find
an unearthly stillness,
a virgin layer
of wind-sculpted snow
that seems to have been smoothed by some celestial hand.
Where the low winter sun
casts long sharp shadows
on the blinding white,
and it seems almost sinful
to venture across.
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