Have the trees lost their leaves
Or am I seeing through my hands?
Have the leaves fallen
Or have I risen from the ground?
Have autumnal abscissions concluded
Or am I like you, deluded?
Have I reached old age
Or everlasting youth?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
Where I’m asked, I’ll go.
The youngest sassafras branches are green, like rose stems.
A broad-winged hawk lands on the hydro tower like one of the gods of voltage.
A cooper’s hawk and kestrel round out the day’s raptures.
Also came across a stand of young honey locust trees, like dancing partners dipping and swaying in the wind.
Along a path of reeds the whispers are like the voices of many lives in parallel universes.
Yesterday I found a dying mantis on the path, with a day moon in one eye.
Fall is falling today like an adagio only I can hear.
As though a Van Gogh of the wind had painted a brush dipped in sunflowers across the forest.
A female cardinal separates her shadow from her shade and turns up in neither.
When a cardinal and a blue jay cross the same path at the same instant, the discernment of truth cuts through the silence of beauty.
Salvatore Ala 