Busy School Teachers

Most of my closest friends are school teachers or professors, so I am deserted this week. It's another sign of Fall.

The moon came out, clear as a bell ringing, clear as crystal etched for champagne, clear as damask on the table last night, surrounded by cirrus, shirred clouds stirred by the winds of the earth. Dandelions gone, buttercups, and things of the past stir in the darkness. The woods are on fire with the presence, trees gathered around in a ring, brown slips of just there.

The grass doesn't know whether to grow or be cut, the tomatoes lie on the ground, like dreams of last night, just waiting. Green ones, and scarlet and ripe and ready with meaning, the meaning a sound in the distance, the scent of the tomato plant, the musky echo from the ground. The trees hold their breath, to be let out when the leaves turn gold, yellow, orange, red, brown, to the ground, to the earth, meet the blue rocks and sky, reflect in water.

To lie on the bed of the creek, with the oyster shells, the tiny ones, they turn black in winter. Grey now, green, with moss. With ferns on the bank, blackened by frost, by pale water, by time, by fall, by nature. By heavens, what a year! Still the fog comes, and coats the summer door frosted. First one cold night, then two, then a warm one, still fragrant from the south. Then the cold creeps into the wind, the wind blows north, then south, then into my garden, to settle and be seen by cats and chrysanthemums.

Wild riots of wind and water stand silver on the grass, the leaves, sliding, sliding onto the rocks, the creek waits and then spills over the trees again and again. The frothy, mud colors move over the tree roots, the rocks disappear, the grass swirling like hair, like the hair of the dog helped anyone, at anytime, not for me.

The water shrinks and swirls and parts, and the rocks reappear, and slice the creek again, to grave the shells to darkness, when the leaves turn, brown on the creekbed. Then black and a black and white dog walks along those paths, a forever dog by my arm I say. His paw print on my arm around a blond dog now, in this fall of saving cats. No room at the inn for the cats of this world and they go to another, where they are wanted, the creek cats, the leaf cats, and lemon sunshine cats, black and gold, grey, white orange, blue. Their eyes peek at me from the leaves of the ferns by the creek, by the trees, the blue rocks.