Beyond horizon and love

Octoberessence

October arrives in skybruise and Gothic fire.
One is a smudge of sky chromality, the other
a spill of meadowing sun. Both are mine this
early morning and I share them with no one.

To keep them, I do this: each vesperous thing
laced in tatted lines against the harshness of
industry and the wheel of the world. Neither
will last for very long, so I am become witness.

Already, sun is claimed by clouds and the fire
is doused. The taffied patch of color is pulled,
too, given over to an smeary viscera of smoke
and heavy vapor that will fail to hold itself up.

One can smell rain if a tilt of nose is set just so,
a vectorary veering toward the west where it will
establish a beachhead in imminent expectation.
Morning and weather and all that that entails.



I see you walking there, a stick of pink at the
base of a long shadow, your feet picking a path
that reveals itself as you go. Birds skit and flush
as you do, disrupting not one step of your traverse.

I cannot join you where you step for you are not
there. I see you as if you were, but neither of us can
bridge this gap of license, span such a shallow surge
to cross from imaginary to a bank of tendered flesh.

So I will settle for a morning in October. It is enough,
I tell myself and whisper to you who are not there, you
who resume your ghostly passage at the pink end of a
long shadow that disappears beyond horizon and love.

Joseph Gallo
October 1, 2010