Autumn

In the heartbreak we call summer, the dog days
of sweating out intentions good and ill on a doorstep,
waiting to see how it all panned out, hoping
beyond hoping we were wrong, that the thing
we saw wasn't the thing we saw, the trouble
around the corner nothing more than a paperboy
lobbing the news on the edge of the driveway.
And somewhere deep or shallow, somewhere
perhaps in the margins of a book we were reading,
we ignored the sign, the lapse of affection.
A cardinal lighted the fence. We called our mothers
to tell her we were in love. There was a vacation.
There was a child. A tether grew from hip
to hip, or so it seemed. It seamed. It seemed.
Sometimes we are blinded by the sun. Sometimes
we are ignited by it, the sheer bloodlust of her
wanting us, and we mistake it for the real.
They're called the dog days because that's when
the dogstar shines, a false light. The madness
that follows. A hand reaching for yours that
was real as a star, and just as far from your reach.
It is Autumn now. The days have given up being
anything but days. Some people call it
the fall, and it is, a falling into a way of thinking
about summer, the falling away of all our false
forgetting, pale side-stepping, a fall our feet
were being prepped for, even though we didn't
know it. We know it's fall by the timid light that shines,
the solace of hands stroking our backs,
and we have a choice:
we can choose to keep falling or stop
short of that glad glory that is
falling in our laps thick as good luck can fall.