Tag Archives: Octember

Daily Walk: Octember Rain

I walked a bit over a mile in Cherokee Park, Louisville this morning as the sun rose behind clouds and rain. I’m still rehabbing from my knee replacements (left knee on May 10, right on September 15). I walked over 4 miles in Iroquois Park Monday before last, but I was wrecked for two days after, so I’m dialing back a bit. I’m doing better than many people do at this point, I have good range of motion, can walk, drive, get up and down stairs, get my pants on without sitting down, and so forth, but I still have some pain, and get fatigued. The goal is still walking the Camino as a pilgrim from the Pyrenees to Santiago de Compostela, and then to Finisterre. So, I keep walking the path.

Luminous Octember

Chosen in Crowtime

The beautiful is not the chosen.
The chosen become beautiful.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxThe Cowboy Junkies
xxx
Wisps and streamers of cirrus
artfully streak
the high china blue—
xxx
The black eyed sunflowers
riot in Van Gogh hues
across this watercolor landscape—
xxx
The green leaves of cottonwood
and scrub oak
subside, differentially, to lime
xxx
and pale jade, the green fuse lit,
slow lambent smolder
soon to ignite the holocaust
xxx
at the end of crowtime,
the full bloom of fall.
The hard whispers of the chosen
xxx
shake down summer,
tinge wild blue with headache,
nag down the long bones of poets
xxx
rheumatic penny whistle lamentations
committing sins of attrition
and long division.
xxx
The chosen shuffle,
like fallen leaves
in a fitful breeze, a flicker
xxx
in the eye, a shudder
in the penumbral kinescope,
replaying other deaths and funerals.
xxx
To say you lived
is to say we loved.
Now bygones be gone, and we still live.
xxx
xxx
Note: The landscape in the poem is Oklahoma, middle of  September. The landscape in the picture is Maryland, along Seneca Creek, middle of October.  Octember and Crowtime are seasons in the weather of–for lack of a better word–the soul, marked by the irruption of kairos into chronos.