Taking the Stick for a Walk

As the stick has not been for a walk for a long time. I took it for a walk through the evening because I had been breathing in student work all day and I had to go get it all out of my hair. When I was in the street, I realized the wind had been fall cleaning too: driving the leaves out and around, and dousing the street with rain that funnelled the leaves into the road. It was a lovely evening, tinged with strangeness, one of those seldom moments that everything is striking and new, so very rare and for the first time, as if never before. The streets dappled with a fallen tumult of wet leaves, the darkness that drives people indoors, the lights of cars rubbing a passing flicker against the silver fenders of audis resting in driveways, the arms of the trees in the wind: anything was first first, first the sight of it and then fading into the thing itself that took shape in the darkness, recognizable only by dint of some forgotten familiarity. It was all, I dread to say, so fresh. The skylight in a roof, pressing the silver of the indoor lighting into the night sky. Then the accent of a wood fire and the bright blue face of a big screen TV through the window pane of a passing house. The slickness of the street and the leaves sighing away. The bare ground where the Scottish thistle had prowled all summer, now grit-level. So much of summer stripped low. And of course, the tattoo of the thorn stick, emboldened now that it was taken for a walk. The pumpkins let loose on the porch, hunkered down. The indistinctness of things barely coming into shape and then moving on and the rich, moist smell of rotting leaves in the time-wearied poem. And the man in the street, dancing a jig out into the headlights, a reedy cartoon contour on a jolly drug. He would dart out and step and backstep in the very path of the incoming headlights, so they would have to slow down and swerve with bemused caution. Then he would dart back into the street and jump out to wave to the next stream of cars. It was a night where everything was preparing to go, away. The crescent moon fanning herself with the crown of a bare tree in the soccer field. It was a night of wet, damp withdrawal and I was part of it and it suited me just fine and I wish I could remember it forever but like the leaves and the wind it is already slipping away from me, yet again. But maybe it was the stick that had called it all forth. A stick happy to be part of the fall two days before Halloween. Which I was glad to have felt, however sparingly, as I feel most everything in life these days.