Trail Mix

Another year gone, leaving everywhere its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time’s measure painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing to stay – how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever in these momentary pastures.