WALKING THROUGH OCTOBER FOG
Everything approaches through a veil, and seems wholly beautiful, as a bride advancing behind tulle, vague, floating, barely perceptible, calls up in the waiting groom a deep hunger for the warm body, its density and clarity, its browns and reds. Then, as they recede, things seem to cry out, the way those most close, most familiar and singularly themselves, leave behind when they depart an ache of longing, and are beloved, misted over by time, distance, or the cool film of death. The leaves bring their nearly unbearable yellow, making their dignified arrival out of the gray, and asters bloom from the cloud, their color deepening from brown to blush to that saturated vermilion, each petal the tip of a slow- formed passion, a spear, pointed as desire. And I want to hold it all and rock it in my arms, this whole earth, emerging from a grounded cumulus of love, first the ghosts of things and then the body, and then the very heart of the things themselves, before they fade into the fog and leave in the limbs that phantom throb of what has disappeared. **Originally published in Louisiana Literature. |