Another Poem about Fall 2005

September 20, 2005
Yesterday morning was cold but by midday it got warm

And as I left work at five o’clock
and started up the street
I was suddenly aware
that the left side of my face was cool and the right side warm
Same was true of my hands
my knees
It took me a moment to understand what was happening
The stone office building
(to my right as I walked)
though now in shadow
had been hit by the sun all afternoon
and was releasing the heat it had absorbed throughout the day
onto me

This morning there was a mix-up with Bill’s carpool
a phone call after he’d already left the house
and I had to grab my keys and jog up the block with moist hair
to tell him where he was waiting on the corner
Don’t worry they’re just going to be late
As I crossed the street heading up the hill
I looked down our street
(down the same eight blocks I walk each morning)
and saw
at the bottom of the hill
between the skyscrapers
a yellow box of sunlight
An open box
as delineated at the bottom by the slant of light coming over a rooftop
as it was on the sides by the tall buildings that frame the street
The light was like a cube
it had color and depth and heft
Though you knew its substance was made up of fog
the cube was a bright shining pale yellow
that didn’t look like fog at all
Rather it looked like a thing you could reach out and touch
that would have a texture somewhere between
cotton candy and consume soup

Later when I left the house again to go to work
the cube was still there
a little fuzzier around the edges and pale silver now rather than gold
Some of the wonder had gone out of it
but there was another interesting thing:
The fog in the box was falling down
straight down
like rain except more slowly
It made me think of those mystical stories where various things
(wisdom, grace, death, what-have-you)
fall out of the sky onto people
once I got down to the bottom of the hill
the fog was
presumably
falling on me
like grace, like water, like boxes of sunlight


image source is here