A treeline in memory

This New World

The light slips out of summer like it did
seven years ago today as I drove through
Germany from Deventer, watched my
first sunset in green Deutschland trying to
imagine how such beauty and horror could
come from such a place—Bach and the blitz-
krieg, Bergen-Belsen and Beethoven, Mahler
and the mayhem that dims along a treeline
in memory now, autumn dropping its yellow
canisters of dying colors and this is Germany
again, seven years later, here in Santa Barbara
with summer in the same place four days
before I met a woman who would teach my
heart love, every motion taken in this new
world another step toward a summer that arrives
in time without me, arriving nevertheless as it
should, as I watch it again depart this new world.

Joseph Gallo
September 20, 2009