autumn autumn autumn pt 6 million

Cinder and smoke
the wind curls around the trees
the juniper bends
as if it were listening

I eat wind like hot honey. My sisters are writing about their season, our season: colors turning like flames, russet, gold, a brown sweeter than any boy’s eyes… I could dance naked in falling leaves, warmed by the trees with their crinkling summer coat, burning breathing what we wrote, high on pine needles beneath my feet. Folk singer’s guitar blends into itself, the same sadness: a city Fall is only smog, fog and peacoats and romance like cigarettes. I’m longing for bonfires the way I used to long for boys, heavy drums that rattle my ribs, to let autumn winds lift my feet off the ground and the night’s breathe move me like the top of a cedar…

Cinder and smoke
you ask me to pray for rain
with ash in your mouth
you’ll ask it to burn again…

Tonight we followed the ghost drums: out the dorm window, down yellow lit walks, past the empty auditorium, doors open, curtains dark… I’ve never noticed the way it is never night here, the way streetlights show the trees: ominous, unnatural wood mountains amidst steel and concrete… The sky is a strange composite, like me, of city and wild—there may be few stars, but you can’t take away that velvet blue, a soft inviting darkness, not the shadows of the tree against the sky, or the way every sound breaks loud and drifts up only to be lost in the void. But there’s still that everpresent streetlamp or car, everything lit from below, an amber darkening…

We found the drums in a gym, along with a vocalist and small ensemble of dancers. By day I would have mistaken any of them for a half-urban punk or another indie-jock… But here they were one, something both different and deeply primal. There was a man holding a bongolike drum, and a vocalist wailing Arabic or Farsi or some other language I must learn simply because of its age… And along with them, four men: jumping, clapping, dancing, all in time, the hypnotic tattoo punctuated by ay ay ays, their movements free and synced and amazing. I’ve come a long way in my poetry, but never enough to describe music… And this: this was bonfire music, nighdark barefoot, wailing and godsex and a people and war and a fierce, fierce joy. I don’t know if it had anything to do with Ramadan, or perhaps an Indian holiday? I know that I was the only woman there, without color, and that all I wanted to do was jump out of my skin, my bones singing like antennae and cattails and violin strings, how I’ve missed drums and rhythm….

Cinder and smoke
The snake in the basement found
The juniper shade
The farmhouse is burning down

So, this is our season, sister lovers... First Virgo, the grounding and the harvest, then Libra, the balance and thanksgiving, then Scorpio, the death, the birth, the reflection we take after the ghosts drift up, trying to remember themselves. Autumn makes me sing, to fly into winterdeath like a war eagle and come out in spring: on fire, to burn and go down in flames the next time the grasses dry.

In this city I dream of a cottage in green, to make good potions and cast circles and runes, to walk the woods barefoot in love. I sleep naked to feel skin on skin, that burning. I read the Wiccan Rede 13 times just for the rhyme and ancientness of it, ask the cedar tree to remember its home and maybe give me a little taste of those mountains, there’s a bonfire burning in my heart and blood is the drum. My lover and I circle it, high on the bone beat, madly in lust with everything that’s bright; I know them from somewhere long ago and ahead… We dance around this earthen star, heady with the balance and the change, building up the flame… For when others settle down to sleep we dance, we burn with winter and awaken the fire in the pines, the heart, the pen...

photo courtesy of http://www.albertdirectory.net 2001 photo contest - "winter fire stand"
song from sam beam's/iron&wine "cinder and smoke"