Homage…#1

Autumn in New York…clouds of olive and silver, miles of fields filled with blackened crackly sunflowers, their sun centers traded for black coal circles; burnt cookies on straw sticks, waving and bent in the chilly breeze. Wild pumpkin patches lie fallow under blue grey sky expanse. ‘Why does anyone buy pumpkins?’ he asks. ‘They’re all here, just sleeping in open fields…orange pumpkins, white pumpkins, yellow gourds…just waiting to be harvested’.

In the darkening heavens, angles of black birds wing their way south; honking and cawing; a large black arrow pointing away from the vagaries of the lake. At the road’s edge, in the soft green center of a sunken drainage gully…an onyx black cat is perfectly seated and calm; oblivious to traffic, watching oncoming headlights, attuned to the birds overhead…thinking about rodents, shadows…the warmth of his distant home.

The sweep of color wanes gently, slowly. What was in days past a brilliant carpeting of copper and scarlet, a bright leafy yellow ribbon encircling the neighborhood…shines now, briefly…only when strands of tired Autumn sunshine break through the clouds and drift downward.

Late afternoon, the rows of trees fold in on themselves and bow down under the darkening gloam.

They wait quietly for the promised wild winds which will shred their final hold on the branches, plummeting them to the damp soil where they eagerly await the opportunity to sleep forever…