The Ongoing Poem Series About the Autumn of 2005 Continues Thusly:

November 11, 2005
As the third week of the month approaches

and I see more and more pictures
of charming placid fat domestic turkeys
I realize I never mentioned the wild turkeys we saw in Freestone
There were four of them
And we saw them twice
walking down the road in a line
Once by the main road as we were driving back from the bakery
and once on the dirt road behind the house as we sat reading on the deck
And the thing was
they were scary
They were big and looked mean and they also looked somehow
prehistoric
They made you think of that thing about birds being related to dinosaurs
They looked like dinosaurs
with their scaly red and gray heads and necks and legs
the way they walked with double-jointed reptilian steps
We were fascinated and glad
we didn’t have to get any closer

So yesterday walking home in the near-dark on Post Street I noticed
a lady smoking a cigarette (rarer and rarer these days)
the fact that the hot dog cart was still open for business
with a little generator running some lights
a black scarf with a black flower in the window of the Levi’s store
a stack of cake pans in the Williams Sonoma window

and then my eyes must have turned inward
I was thinking maybe about a movie
Yeah I was
I was thinking about Uma Thurman’s hairstyle
with all the little red bows up the back of her head
in the stupid movie we watched the other night
and I must have been picturing it in my mind’s eye
as my real eyeballs apparently stopped working entirely
Next thing I knew I was way up past Tiffany’s and suddenly saw
Union Square getting ready for Christmas
The big dark tree being put up with the cranes around it
the enormous wreath on the front of Macy’s half lit
all those green neon wreaths
in the windows of the building that used to be Magnin’s
(but a few were burned out)
All the same stuff that’s there every year
but new
because now
New because this year is not any other year

And the nice soft sleepy early morning light is back now
It didn’t take long
The last few weeks since daylight-savings time turned off
it’s been a bit jarring how late and bright and light the mornings looked
but the days get shorter fast
and the clouds this morning had a pale pink sunrise sheen about them
And the sky was back to being that softer paler fuzzy early morning blue

image source is here