Dates Of Autumn !!better!! -

So you turn your collar up. You walk inside. You leave the door unlocked for the winter because you know now: every ending is just a dark room where the next beginning is waiting to be lit.

The ninth date: the final hinge before the long cold. You walk through the orchard where nothing is left but a few stubborn crabapples and the memory of wasps. The wind has a new vocabulary— nouns like grief and rest . dates of autumn

The eighth date is a funeral and a feast— the last tomatoes, bruised but sweet, the first frost stitching silver across the grass. You take down the summer wreath, hang up the bone-white gourds. Something in you is dying, something else is being born. So you turn your collar up

Here is the full text for “Dates of Autumn,” an original poetic piece written in the spirit of the season. The ninth date: the final hinge before the long cold

The sixth date is the quietest: a fog that swallows the hills, a spider’s geometry glazed with dew, the sound of a single acorn hitting the driveway. You remember every person you have ever loved in October, and you forgive them all.

The fourth date is a wild one— the wind tears down the maples’ modesty, shakes the oaks until they rattle their brown secrets. You find a feather caught in the screen door, and the moon is a thumbnail scraped across black paper.