Beyond the Reach

The leaves are mostly gone in this part of Ohio now. I miss them, as I always do ... the brilliant arrays of color ... the way they catch the sun and bounce it back at the viewer ... warm days and cool nights.

It was today's photo ... of one of my favorite trails in a park not too far from home ... which set this train of thought in motion. 

Autumn ... I may have said this before ... is one of my favorite seasons ... actually, there are things I like about the other three, too.

I do like autumn's cooler weather after summer's scorching days and stifling nights ... and the changing colors ... I look at them as a struggling watercolorist might be expected to ... wondering how I might put them into a painting.

Sometimes I settle for a photograph, resolving to study it later, perhaps transform it into a painted interpretation of the scene.

Each season, of course, marks the passage of time ... each with its own characteristics registering that onward march.

Today's poem is about that onward march, with a focus on the seeming suddenness with which is sometimes occurs ... and that squirrel's nest "being parceled now by an autumn wind":

BEYOND THE REACH

I had walked there last summer,
pausing almost daily to enjoy
the shade, little suspecting
a drama unfolding overhead.

Then, overnight, it seemed,
the maples shed their burnished
leaves, stood starkly splaying
nerve endings against the sky.

High in the branches of one,
a nest beyond the reach
of muttering traffic noises,
made with no special plan,

yet an ageless pattern marking
nursery, rec room, school, point
of departure for a another
curiosity-stoked generation

of squirrels, all of this being
parceled now by an autumn wind.

What a shame, I thought, a shame
to let the wind steal such work.
© 1997
(originally published in Block's Magazine)

Today's word: parceled