Autumn Leaf


 

Autumn leaf. Color sienna gold rose, yellow inlay, ochre veins. Months of growth stilled in life, autumn leaf left my feet walking up to an old nameless tree in the city. Birds sang branches above the autumn leaf. I remove my gloves, brr in the chilled air, breath curls cold like the once green leaf, dipped in bronzed seasons change to harden, form a sort of swirl natural, slung low on the city tree. I reach through open air, grasp the wood twig stem, bend and carefully crack snap the leaf. The tree kindly obliges, welcomed with grace my please to please take a piece of God’s nature with me. 

 

My shadows long, blue, laid simply on the lead piled grass. I hold autumn’s leaf in my palm, careful to retain its seasonally swirled shape, not to crunch the delicate rose gold cast of God’s creative form. I find a gold hoop earing in the grass. Things don’s move too fast, i’m lost in the music of life, found in the breath of love kept in God.

 

I walk the city sidewalks, stroll past a frieze i’ve seen so many times before and never like this time now, i take a photo, turn, smile into the sun. The photo pictures an array of swirling bronze cast bodies holding the words i read “come set a spell.”

 

And as i sit at Peixoto Coffee, the autumn leaf on my table, i believe it resembles a fortune cookie both in color and form. I remember the last fortune cookie i opened had no litanical slip of chinese-american oracle written in. My friend said i’ve fortune enough anyhow, i said perception is our fortune.

 

Now fortunately i’ve the words to write something of meaning, and if i be only an empty autumn leaf, still i am of the same life of us all, in which God creates, in which we are one in love, through which we have joy, communion, colors, perceptive fortune, pieces of art we are in with and within Gof who is love and is our creator; we make a fine cast, together a perfect composition.