September mornings / by Christina Rosalie

Sometimes there are other things. Mornings of sleeping in an extra half hour instead of getting up and dragging myself to the keyboard in the pre-dawn chill, because my days already feel like the fragile worn fabric of a quilt. The first flu of the season has me bleary eyed and achy. I’d whimper, but the afternoons with skies all blue and full of tatters, make me too happy.

The weather has been perfect. The leaves falling, every day more, until the ground has become a kaleidoscope of red and yellow. Days are filled with small things that make me be right here. Pomegranates are in season. The wood is stacked, cords deep, and our new wood stove arrived; fire-engine red, tucked into a corner in the dining room. Apples are tangy and sweet now, and on the tree beyond the kitchen window they look like the burnished red beads on some old woman’s necklace. The air’s still sweet and noisy with the end of summer: crickets at night, and the last cut of hay, but there is a bite to the mornings.

Sometimes I want fragments. Short phrases. Words in the loop of a poem; the dangling thought of an elipsis; the wanton lust of the run-on. Sometimes I can't say things all the way, the way they are. Instead, the feeling is simply there, welling up. Like woodsmoke in the air, or the red streak of the tanager. This week I want to return to something I did last September. A poem a day. A morning poem. Whatever words come to mind to paint the colored arc of soul and dreams across the page. Tomorrow, first thing, with a steaming mug and the fog rising, I'll scatter careless armfuls of words like autumn leaves. Will you join me?