OCTOBER PLACES

Far enough on the edges is where the highways begin to slow and move out in their own ways to smaller streets and eventually gravel dirt. These are curious places if you look a bit closer. There is first the regular enough feeling of the everyday because of electrical lights, familiar stores, and soft shoulders. There are, afterwards, more mom and pop gas stations, and beyond that there are none for long stretches. Fewer lights and those shoulders that house places for the broken down vehicles disappear. What is left? A bit of a rougher hewn atmosphere, but also environs that contain and maintain their own mystique. 

Or, it’s not so much that something is contained, but that something is either let in or not

taken out. And what is that something. It could be the fresher air. Or the lack of light pollution which allows one to glance up at the constellations. It might be looking at the moon for some reason because you are simply less distracted.

If your dream is of boats, you might find yourself thinking on them without a definite reason. Who is to know for certain? It might be all these things and many more. Possibly there are vortexes, and exposure to more metaphysical artifacts. For a traditionalist, it can simply be the flaxen and golden aura of wheat or feed corn fields that have made themselves wide and long, robust, healthy; by most anyone’s metric or standard, for a picture, a painting, a story, or a poem. And the sky, clear blue. What about the old style fences, - wooden and sectioned and put there by old farmers and their helpers. 

A coyote that comes in the distance and watches you watching him watching you watching him. Then he moves back and back and back until just a dot before disappearing like a dream into the larger series of trees that begin a forest you will never see or know. A family of hawks flying off. Other birds that yell out something. Wild berries. Odd chaparral. Seasonal pumpkins in open air markets along with hay, straw, jams in soulful jars and fruit and vegetables that wait in containers just right. No cards. Just cash. No neon. Hand written signage. No soda machine.

Sometimes a transport truck goes past. Someone runs out of an old house, Victorian like, -

and goes towards a chore or activity. Barns, - how did they get so big. Silos, those silos in the sun. The world seems large, is large. The little shores with crayfish parts, broken shells, and rocks. Those rocks are green and yellow, red and other, - and seem so bright just under or around the clean water. Can you read them? Can you feel them? Read like a book. Feel like corn or tomato or apple. Rocks.

Even though everything is made of bits of light and there is nothing under or in anything, - there is a world. We have to say so. Sometimes it is wintry and the snow rains down ten thousands flecks. Other times it is stormy and summer, the pressures unsettled and the skies in quite a mood. Or spring, - whimsical, a promissory note writ nicely on the earth that speaks of flowers and green summits. 

And autumn, - orange, red, green, and more tolerable than the oppressive heat or the angry cold. Autumn if lived and seen rightly can be or at the least be likened to the perfect kiss. There is a world. There is an autumn. There are places on the edges that are pastoral maybe not divine still, they are much better than good, eh. 

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