September Suspenders

Two days I've been saving up.

September 10

I am a deep October man
sitting on a rock on the shore of Spy Pond,
Five female mallard ducks paddle by me, sensing opportunity.
Long shells with eight oarsmen or oarswomen glide by at a distance
plowing through shimmers of sun in the water.
"That's it guys!" calls a coxswain,
loud and encouraging in the afternoon of September tenth.
The wind is up. Summer is a shrinking thing.
Its time is short. But the sun is strong still
and the clouds are like soil turned over by
a ploughshare

Adventures in Writing

 A daily conversation between trees, sun, air, and water, condensing into coded configurations of clouds. I don't know what they're saying. I'm like a reporter in a country with a language I don't speak. Guessing is encouraged. Rhythms abound. Shells, ducks. Waves, wind. Nature is what we call it, from the word for "being born." Because it's always claiming life as if it just arrived, which it did: constantly just arriving.

September suspenders
holding up fall
September sepulcher
a big leaf pile
September separation
sky and cloud
fizz of crickets
macintosh apples
                                                                                                                                                                       

September 11

It's the sacred bullet hole in the calendar: edges singed brown, going all the way through the 11and every 11 of every September.  And I recognize the weather: a big high pressure dome with a deep cerulean sky, beautiful summerfall day, reassuring warm sun and crickets repeating measured tempus fugits from the bushes. Summer at her most desirable, when she's packing up, when she's getting rare and yet lingers, especially in the morning, stretched out in a chair in Brooklyn or Far Rockaway with a coffee and the paper when something happens in lower Manhattan—distant confusion, something not right, an airplane flying into one of the skyscrapers and smoke billowing for miles.A distant catastrophe, almost small enough to be meaningless, but all those distant sirens are real, and so is what's on TV. And the days stayed persistently beautiful for weeks.