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  • Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s A Ball and Chain

After the leaves have fallen, the sky turns blue again, Blue as a new translation of Longinus on the sublime. We wink and work back from its edges.

We walk around

Under its sequence of metaphors, Looking immaculately up for the overlooked. Or looking not so immaculately down for the same thing. If there’s nothing going on, there’s no reason to make it up. Back here, for instance, next to the cankered limbs of the plum trees, We take a load off. Hard frost on the grass blades and wild onion, Invisibly intricate, so clear. Pine needles in herringbone, dead lemon leaves, dead dirt. The metaphysical world is meaningless today, South wind retelling its autobiography

endlessly

Through the white pines, somesuch and susurration, shhh, shhh…

NOTE

“All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself ” and “Autumn’s Sidereal, November’s a Ball and Chain” from APPALACHIA by Charles Wright. ©1998 by Charles Wright. Reprinted by permission of the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

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