The Orchestra of Reading

Copper collects in corners around the front door enclave. The leaves seem to fall in groups, still attached to each other. I add a sweatshirt atop a long-sleeved shirt which makes me feel warmer. And restricted.

I've sat in this chair in the dark corner writing about autumn and the coming winter one hundred times before now. The calendar changes yet continues to mark the very same days.

October ripens in the newly unrestrained light, pouring into the places accustomed to hidden life. Tea cups and Tchaikovsky's letters prefer to be handled by palms, not fingers. The orchestra of reading wakes a hibernating immigrant and she is famished!

Notebooks and pages and the way words become crowbars wedged into the slightest give. A lapidary solace emerges to remind the reader of how she has withered.

Bringing the outside plants in, along with spiders and earwigs and other various crawling things I'll never know the names of. Have you ever noticed how the wind tells one how to feel? In this way I believe I have lost all neutrality. I do care, little nuthatch!

Bees, skunks, and predawn rabbits – I enfold you into my days even without a word.