The Landscape of Autumn
"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."
—George Eliot
“Yet often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.”
Beam of Light
A still pool of water
clear as glass imprinted with images of the sky
a sunbeam of light on a lone aspen tree
in a forest of green.
The leaves sparkle golden yellow
like a sequin dress on a dance floor.
I cast to green-brown Cutts
with red slashes on their bellies and throats
I wonder
if the trout mirror the colors of the landscape
or if the forest and plants along the banks
of the river mirror the colors of the Cutts.
David Gallipoli
“There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last, and every one of them keeps making things.”
Fire
Not long after the lightning struck,
a new season started for insects smaller than a pencil point
where they made homes in the soil beneath fallen trees and deep ash.
Pileated woodpeckers, mountain chickadees, ravens, and the tanager
ate the insects and shared berries with black bears.
New shrubs and vegetation grew again in all the primary colors of autumn, unfurling their wall-to-wall blanket
under the blackened firs, ponderosas, tamaracks,
a marina without sails.
A snake of green serpentines down a steep slope,
a trickle of water underneath makes its way to the river
feeding the forest that grows back on its terms.
David Gallipoli
The storms of Autumn
deliver snow to mountains
a white beginning
David Gallipoli
Under an Autumn Moon