With night drawing on, I settle

in silence to gather my half-

formed thoughts of an afternoon’s

fleeting apparitions, where the sky

more resembled a reflecting pool

of standing water than a chamber

of frosted air and how the would-

be artist inside of me retraced the

very way day, in its rustic autumn

palette, slowly turned inward upon

itself as if in mourning, and, standing

apart in distant splendor, an outpost

of woodland birches and the straw-gold

bounty of sugar maples drinking

in the last of the impoverished light,

all tethered to muddy fields and the

dried stalks of distant rushes, fluttering

and loosely feathered, or, closer in,

an unkempt garden overflowing

with the fragrant froth of asters

freckled with enough bees to

replace the nearer stars all while

a downpour of dusk, donning a

grackle’s plumage, descended,

and how each image emerged

with the type of grandeur that

held the heart and offered both

hope and promise in a world that

provides so very little of either.