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In three weeks I'll go to you, Colorado,
and see your aspen quaking orange to yellow
in suspended sunset, and kiss your mountain
ridges with my bare feet, dancing. But today
the air is hot like yesterday, yet mystic,
hollowed of thickness and strange,
as the sun dips below the equator—
as the globe resets to equilibrium.
Last week the leaves started falling—
rose petals upon a church aisle
before a virgin's timid toe tips. And oh!
How I long to be intimate with you, beloved Autumn—
to wrap you with wool sweaters and breathe
you to smoke in the frigid morning—to touch
my fingertips to your jeweled dewdrops,
crowning the browning summer grass,
before the months of frost descend.
As the geese gather by the duck pond, rehearsing
aerial v-formations, I toss them breadcrumbs
from a wheat-loaf gone stale on the kitchen counter—
remnants of yesterday, of summer,
of colors vivacious and heat unforgiving,
and air permeable with moisture,
almost touchable, sliceable, like butter.
But the thickness is thinning and the colors, graying.
I turn and look farther and more squarely north,
toward the mountains, where the air was never thick,
and stoop to smell a flower fading pink,
one last time, before its folding petals drop
like yesterday's love letters into my mailbox. Yes,
in three weeks I'll go to you, Colorado.
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