When next year bursts and burrows where it falls - poem

Sierra, July-August, 1992 by Dan Harder

Rusted red and trembling in an afternoon of wind, the arms go boney - once again - as autumn weaves among the trees. All the fat is taken in, bundled in and jarred waiting, plump and gathered, for the slower feasts of empty months. This is the time of hazeled air when the land is a tally of pears and milk; this, the time when a man tells his wife,l he while swelling shelves with fruit, she, in the midst of a jar, tells her when he know it's fall.

"The sun goes soft," he says, "soft in a tighter sky." And for her? ... And for her, though she says it's the fruit brought in, believes, instead, that the season starts when next year bursts and burrows where it falls.