I am a refrigerator,
my accumulated coolness weeping away.
I am a kinship group of fully extended oak leaves
swaying and spinning ceaselessly
in the punctuated gusts of the new-season storm
that walks in among us
(like the uninvited guest at the neighborhood mixer
we have not, in fact, ever held)
to turn off the lights and the machines 
that keep us all ticking. 
 
I am the sound of the distant tires
huffing off to a place where things can still get done.
I am the silence of things not getting done.
I am the wind deep-breathing after a calculated pause 
as if to remind us who is lord of this condition.
I am the emptiness of the silent house,
the shadows in the room's missing corridors,
the powerlessness,
the sound of one pen writing.
                        

What do we have in common?
That hell-bent-for-leather descent,
blatant contrast 
to our struggle upward to what, in fact, 
we have no idea: 
A full gung-ho rally 
of folks with well-developed calves? 
A parking lot of gawking 'vista' tourists 
such as the over-publicized 'cobble' crawl 
we passed up that afternoon to find our own 
slogging fun...
Or just another switchback 
in autumn's march-time windfall 
of glorious days
falling on both the youthful conquerors
of local mountains 
who sacrifice silence to the thrill of the chase,
and those who no longer hear those bugle calls 
for the timeless sirens of the sunset?
 
Once, in the long ago, my son rode his BMX 
into the woods behind my 'street bike'
repurposed to find a way among scrubby trees 
and the occasional stony exposure,
barely keeping vertical along sketchy trails of local use 
by folks who can no longer remember a time 
when they found hours to hang in the woods...
 
We two hung together, maintaining just enough headway
to keep my old two-wheeler from falling over, 
a joint forward-momentum that has endured 
the years, 
the way an old dirt road keeps twisting skyward,
and young daredevils 
steal an hour from their doom.
                        

…are 'the best thing in the world,' she said.
We say it again this year. 
We say it with the faded goldenrod
that turns to cornmeal star-bursts
when we bring it indoors.
We see it in the carmine teardrop leaves
of the season’s first-bearing, first-turning fruit trees,
blushing from the kiss of borealis; 
in the burnished seeds of always-impending Phragmites,
copper-brown as the grain of some other autumn harvest;
 
and, this week, especially among the asters,
those children of stars that line the roadsides
like avatars of another spring,
reminding us of every reason we have ever possessed 
to focus on the road
ahead