Autumn — Part 1

Yesterday, I felt the smell of autumn in the air — like an unexpected someone from the past with time on her hands and memories to tell.  Because we remember autumn, she and I — fresh days and school books and sacred secrets so tender you could cut them with a glance.  Long afternoons dark with broken hearts and lingering poetry no one will ever read.  And she and autumn spoke as though the years were stored in cardboard boxes, dusty, glue-dried and sagging.  Then, at the end, she said she’d missed me and kissed me on the cheek in the glove-cold street of the autumn afternoon, because …

Autumn is the long notes of the last jazz piano when the café is closed and only the serious remain, sitting like abandoned angels unable to fly.  And there, somewhere in the final tales of lingering whiskey, they wonder if second-hand love could possibly redeem them.

Autumn is a park bench moist with morning, waiting like a reluctant traveller who’s been left behind.  And there’s a puddle, quiet with reflection and a footprint and floating leaves leftover from the wind.  And the worn letter plaque tells no one but the sky that Arthur Wilson liked to walk his dog.

Autumn is stone empty streets slanted with light from the windows of strangers.  But you keep walking because you don’t know if they’re warm with conversations, or silent with despair.

Autumn is a movie, old and familiar, when the outside night is bony and brittle and full of the dark.  So you pour the wine in the kitchen and break the chocolate onto a plate.  And you cozy into your one-light twilight and wait for the melancholy.

And autumn is a black-and-white San Fran foggy night, heavy with crime.  He’s turned his collar high so only his eyes can see her, standing in the silhouette shadows, sinister with deceit.  And he knows (because he always knows) that she will walk away, and the sound of her footsteps will be his only souvenir.