Behold the famous disappearing man who comes in crimson robes and leaves in yellow rags

The leaves outside my window are still green, but the wind has turned cool and blows ragged down the street, and the sky has risen out of its drifts of cloud-haze into that high, pale brilliance that means autumn. I love this season. I love that it feels like change, that you can see the world transforming itself around you in the bright death of leaves and the sky that pares itself cleaner and more distant until it's ready to hold the winter sun; I love how the air is never still, and the sunlight has a warmthless, white-knife clarity, that falls across your hands like a pointer toward the eventual dark; but now, here, on the threshold, all the world is as fiery as something that knows it will die, and it does rage against the dying of the light. Autumn and winter, my favorite seasons: the dark and the endless fall of leaf. Autumn is the dance macabre. Autumn is the hinge. I might walk in autumn forever, if I would not start to long for snow.

For your autumnal delectation and delight, therefore, is presented my first viable (and naturally mythological) poem, "Hallows." Written in December 2000, accepted in January 2001, finally published in February 2002 in the now-defunct Glyph #7.* Strictly speaking, it's not a poem for the equinox so much as for Halloween, but it still seemed appropriate enough. I admit there is probably too much recent exposure to Seamus Heaney in the language, and I clearly hadn't learned to appreciate the virtues of either punctuation or enjambment, and thank God my style evolved: but I'm still fond of it. Of all the pieces I wrote when I was re-attempting poetry in college, this was the first that I knew had some hope of its own life; its obsessions are still in me. May you like this dream of a season.

Hallows

There was a door left open in the year
And through it came hawthorn leaves and berries
And maple leaves before they dry up and dwindle
And hands that rustled when they clasped.
In the resonant spaces between the hours of the clock
Before the strokes of midnight faded or began
Her waist was a sheaf of corn
And her gathered hair leaped with shadow.
At the corner of vision she flaked into handfuls
Of stubbled grass and spilling grain. When she cried
Her tears were barley. Twelve tears.
There was a door slammed shut against the year
And the drifts of souls like mist
Or clinging damp of that first morning in November
And the double-sighted children born
While the seeded tears winnowed down her cheeks
And the reveling clatter in the graveyard
And the stubbed snuffed end of the year
Expiring in smoke, like the fire made in the morning
Of the peeling mat of leaves packed and smelling of regret
In the concrete steps out front. With the sodden smoke
The lock turned. Hollow stalks snapped
In the hand, white tearing flesh of apples
Turned brown and rolled across the lumpen earth.
There was a hinge in the year
Past now and raining toward winter.
Morning discloses her remnants, hard eye-knots
Of acorns, old blade-bronze of beech leaf
Some long, tough strips of corn-husk
Yellow and grey as old parchment
Beaten and tattered by the rain
Withered, dead, indomitable, eternal.
There is a year turning.

*And somewhere in between those latter two dates, I discovered Greer Gilman's Moonwise, which is one of the true autumnal books of all literature. Robert Holdstock comes close in edges of Mythago Wood and Lavondyss, and he understands masks; Patricia McKillip's The Book of Atrix Wolfe has the wood of Faerie, where the leaves are always golden and always falling; but Greer Gilman knows, somehow, the chill and the endless leaf-drift of the autumn wood of my dreams: time circling like a dry leaf in a rain-pool, the threshold that has no door. "He walked in the Cloudwood that they were to fell, had felled long since; though where he walked was autumn still, amid the flocks of leaves alighting on his face, his sleeve, his hair. He shook them from the folds of sleep . . . Being still where leaf and its foretelling image met, he did not know if he rose or fell through time. For times he had risen from a sleep to find his clothes tattered to a heap of leaves; or having fallen like a swath of grass beneath the scything moon, as pale in its wandering as a homeward mower, he had waked in the cold fog on moorland hoar with frost: a stark and sunburnt, rainbleak scarecrow." Angela Carter's "The Erl-King" is the only piece I know that offers a real challenge, especially in its opening paragraphs, but Moonwise has balladry. Ah, but you'd lay me down and love me . . .