And the garden fires are burning

Now the sun is in autumn: crisp and moonlit the night before last, palely bright yesterday, today already grey and granite-clouded—if still greener—as November. More than any other, this season for me is stamped and overstamped with past years, so that there are fossils in each amber sunset, currents of faces in the chilling turn of the wind. I am returning home by an older route. I am reading by the wrong light. This is not the bed I should wake up in. Maybe it's not that the ghosts rise up at this time of year so much as I begin to feel like one myself. Two days ago, a hawk was brooding in the honey locust. The grapevines are tangling to the earth.