I am the season of autumn.
With the world revolving all around me and me, sitting here like a rock in the river's flow, watching the current rush laughing like a freight train toward my chest, bending around me and never ceasing, never quieting as it neatly avoids me and hurtles on its way. The distance swallows sound as the freight train is gone, not even the suggestion of dust in the air to follow. The moon is bloated and pregnant in the sky above, a painted button on a revolving door backdrop, there and not there as the groaning earth shudders beneath it.
I am the season of autumn.
My back aches from blocking the current, and I wonder if it would be easier to flow, to dissolve my skin and wash into the brook, floating iridescient like motor oil on the surface. I do not know how to lose myself, and the water comes into me, whispers between my nerves, tugs at the inner workings of my muscles as if to unravel them from the inside. Instinctively I shrug it off and once again there is the river and there is me, and neither will have anything to do with the other. I watch the waters rush, perhaps to keep a deadline that the rest of the world is not privy to. They move too quickly to hold a reflection.
I am the season of autumn.
Leaves like orange teacups gliding along the knife's edge of the water. One by itself caresses my skin but it is gone before I can turn around. That is, it has collided with the riverbank, where hundreds like it have retreated to rot. There is no orange there, only browns and blacks. Color conforms to the soul of its possessor. I peer at my own skin, my dark eyes free from dilution as long as I am squinting. Has it washed away like sidewalk chalk in July?