November offers caramels of granite — Tomas Tranströmer
The air is crisp. The leaves are crisp. The blue of the sky is crisp. And looking up its etymology, I see crisp goes back to latin a kind of curling and back before that to the Proto-Indo-European root meaning "to turn, bend." And my mind turns in the cold and the weather is turning and I remember the leaves wrestling themselves in the corner of the schoolyard the boys in all tight jean jeans and tight jean jackets and faded black tshirts or white tshirts and they are seventeen, another species from me, and one is them is standing on top of a car with a sledge hammer and one of them is wearing a down vest with a patch on the back with a picture of an eagle landing on fire, and with a mallet in his long arms, is breaking the windows, and another one in all black jeans has a rearview mirror in his hands but he is walking away from the car and and making out with the girl with the feathered hair, and she blushes pink and both of their hair is long and feathered and merges. The older boy smokes and her hair now smells like smoke and she is still blushing and I am in love with this colour that comes to her neck and checks and lips and she is alive and embarrassed and her eyes look wet and her eyelashes glint and she is my babysitter and she has been kissed in front of the schoolbus in the corner of the school parking lot that is brick and leaves still vibrating in the corner of of the brick school but they are whirlwinded out.
I must have been lonely. If I was there looking so closely at the bricks at the spiral of crackly leaves lonely enough that I still remember the particular colour of those school bricks that I was enough outside of this piece of childhood to see it as a scene. Or maybe not lonely maybe just open and it was nature that found me ready. Anyone who saw would notice the way the bits of leaves made the air in that corner of the school visible tracing a smooth spiral up within the hard lines of the wall of bricks. A squared circle. An afterlife of leaves. A snake eating its tale in a wistful dream. Was it November? It must have been November.
This Is a Letter This is a letter to November, its gray bowl of sky riven by black-branched trees. A letter to split-tomato skins, overripe apples, & a flock of fruit flies lifting from the blueing clementines' wood crate. To the broken confetti of late fall leaves. This is a letter to rosemary. This is a letter to the floor's sink & creak, the bedroom door's torn hinge moaning its good-night. This is to the unshaven cheek. To cedar, mothballs, camphor, & last winter's unwashed wool. This is a letter to the rediscovered, to mulch, pine needles, the moon, frost, flats of pansies, the backyard, hunger, night, the unseen. This is a letter to soil, thrumming as it waits to be turned. This is a letter to compost, eggshell's bone-ash chips, fruit rinds curved like fingernails, & stale chunks of bread. A letter to the intimate dark - mouth-warm & damp as a bed. This is a letter to the planet's scavenging lips. —Rebecca Dunham
It was last weekend that I found it. I’d been looking for things to collect for the last details of my children’s book and I was on my bike in the old oak Savanah not far from my home I needed a branch of buckthorn with its berries and sassafras leaves, some vines and handful of pinecones and I was hoping to find two little oak leaves making a Y shape on a branch. According to the plan in my head, the oak sprig needed to have the round-lobed leaves not ones with the rough spikier shape and have that bronze shimmer that oak leaves get just before they let go and fall. And I was dead tired. And the oak trees were old-trunked with leaves way up in the blue sky and acorns all around but no saplings. I got back on my bike figuring at least I could find the sassafras grove and then I stopped because there was a huge branch split off from the trunk and the leaves were all bronzed dead. The glint caught my eye and I parked my bike and started looking for just the right little sprig for my project. At first I saw the tawny balls of fluff on the leaves, and then looking up higher, something that was not quite an acorn but about that same size and clamped onto a thin branch or really emerging from the branch and it took me a moment because you don’t often see the larger ones in my city but of course it had to be. And how almost uncanny is this little hard sphere, this woody bark-berry thing.
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