She was the poet about whose work I had been raving—stopping friends and making them listen, stealing her book into conversation, (blogging). She wrote to me, then, asked about autumn in Pennsylvania. Said she missed it like she missed the spring's pear trees.
I said, Here is the view of just now, the slam-in upon my glass-topped desk. Here is morning, in autumn, in Pennsylvania.
The wind whips, the rain slaps, the trees shake off their leaves (too soon, don't be in such a hurry). It is autumn turning to winter here. It is winter coming.
I am summoning the courage today to return to a book that I've been writing, off and on, for two years. An historical novel that, I fear, I've written too precisely. So that there isn't enough air between the words. So that a reader has to hear a very particular background song to hold the rhythm, therefore the characters, therefore the mood, in place.
I am up early, searching for air.
It happened in one day: My Japanese maple shorn. We went away, and we came home, and the tree had shed itself of color. In the morning, when the moon still hung so fat and wide between the white panes of my window, I crept outside and photographed what I had thought of as the tree.
Now it is pure architecture out there—all structure and bone collecting (as I write this now) the newest shimmer of moon. My friend Alyson writes from Wyoming about her own bright moon, and Grete writes from an ocean beyond, and Kris writes from Los Angeles—all of us watching the colors shift and the moon fatten, then go cold.
This is life in its broadest sketch, and in its most intimate tones.
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