Falling Silent

And now comes the best season

   Not yet the brilliant leaves,

      The pumpkin and the cranberries,

         The fragrance and the crackling underfoot.

No. This is the hour of silence.

   The muffled whispers and the white stillness

      The hazy rivers and the haunted shadows

         Now is the season of the mist

Drifting along the surface of the ponds,

   Rising in a curtain across the fields

      Revealing hidden streams

Unfamiliar phantoms fill the farmyards.

   Fog swirls and thickens.

        The traveler, lost a mile from home,

            Finds himself forsaken in an unknown world.

And the swamp, mysterious on the most prosaic days,

   Yields herself to the enchantment,

      Waits as the ghostly wisps weave themselves through her branches,

         Now concealing, now revealing

            Her deepest secrets.

Further along the road, a tree-encircled field

   Becomes a giant bowl that fills with clouds

      that rise

         and build

              and spill

Like smoking incense from a thurible

   Pouring a last cool benediction across the road

      Before the sun’s heat burns the mystery from the day.

AMDG