Autumn on a Saturday Morning

Gorgeous, glorious fall! The trees make us take notice aflame with their own mortality, their own ashes spread on our windshields the morning after.

We walk with our loves on the wet sidewalks, kicking up their sticky leaves, a chain of yellow across our city. In a moment of flirtation, we pick them up, toss them up like Lebron tosses up chalk, and listen to the shrieks.

The naked silhouetted branches crisscross Seattle's gray skies, electricity lines, the exhaust of airplanes on a crisp clear afternoon. The contrasts of Fall, and its simplicities, make me believe the haiku is the poetic form for bare branches and the woodblock print the art.

The empty branches provide new vistas--"Now we can see Rainier!"--but decline and loss provide for only a short while; soon, we'll burn for rejuvenation.

Before all of fall falls away, its beauty dissolved by Winter, the leaves provide our the illumination. More than the white headlights on the freeway, more than the evening neon signs of restaurants, it's the leaves that illuminate. The trees' leaves, raging against the dying of their light, become our sun, and the heat they provide is not felt on the flesh, but in the soul.