Rising Through the Fallen

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Rising Through the Fallen (see in Gallery / Store) | Image by Bruce Harris

The late autumn air

has cooled in quadrants

of forties and thirties.

The prairie trail is 

hollowed, a seawall of

brown stalks taller than

the average man. The leaves

dull plum and dirt orange

no dapples of lucent

gold leaves ablaze in

glorious decay, simply

bereft of sun employed

like subverted pocket change.

The tallest stalks are

brittle not yet breakable

in thick jagged wind.

Their seed pods wave to 

and fro in the brisk air 

moored on fading wild ground.

Even purple eyed Astor

usually the last buoyant

men, have winked their last

time before inevitable

submerge and surrender.

So many stalks, some small

some near eight feet tall

too many to count.

Their resonance lost,

lined in the meadow, an armada

of ghosts. So many seeds. Still

in time-lapse they fall

spraying up and out like

snow. It is not macabre to

admire death, to watch it

for what it is, the shucking and

melting soil 

the communal float of dry 

seed eddying in spasms of

chilled air. Winter has its own

echoes of white sleep

then these fields will awash

in greening, light spinning to

emerald flowering ultramarine

aborning their own vernal

reef, their own titillations

and chromatics and weeks of licentious

sunrise, its feathery iridescence, its

vital flare.