In the utter peace and stillness the world seemed holding its breath, a little apprehensively, drawing near to the fire to warm itself. There was none of that sense of urgeful, pushing life that robs even a calm spring day of the sense of silence; life was over and the year was just waiting, harboring its strength for the final storms and turmoil of its death. The warmth and the color of maturity was there, exultant and burning, visible to the eyes, but the prophecy of decay was felt in a faint shiver of cold at morning and evening and a tiny sigh of the elms at midnight when a wandering ghost of a wind plucked a little of their gold away from them.

A Corymbus for AutumnHow are the veins of thee, Autumn, laden?Umbered juices,And pulpèd oozesPappy out of the cherry-bruises,Froth the veins of thee, wild, wild maiden.With hair that mustersIn globèd clusters,In tumbling clusters, like swarthy grapes,Round thy brow and thine ears o'ershaden;With the burning darkness of eyes like pansies,Like velvet pansiesWhere through escapesThe splendid might of thy conflagrate fancies;With robe gold-tawny not hiding the shapesOf the feet whereunto it falleth down,Thy naked feet unsandalled;With robe gold-tawny that does not veilFeet where the redIs meshed in the brown,Like a rubied sun in a Venice-sail.

These marvels were great and comfortable ones, but in the old England there was a greater still. The weather behaved itself.In the spring all the little flowers came out obediently in the meads, and the dew sparkled, and the birds sang; in the summer it was beautifully hot for no less than four months, and, if it did rain just enough for agricultural purposes, they managed to arrange it so that it rained while you were in bed; in the autumn the leaves flamed and rattled before the west winds, tempering their sad adieu with glory; and in the winter, which was confined by statute to two months, the snow lay evenly, three feet thick, but never turned into slush.

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath. The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination.

Something about the time of year depressed him deeply. Overcast skies and cutting wind, leaves falling, dusk falling, dark too soon, night flying down before you are ready. It's a terror. It's a bareness of the soul. He hears the rustle of nuns. Here comes winter in the bone. We've set it loose on the land. There must be some song or poem, some folk magic we can use to ease this fear. Skelly Bone Pete. Here it is in the landscape and sky. We've set it loose. We've opened up the ground and here it is. He took Interstate 45 south. He didn't want them to kill Leon. He felt a saturating sense of death, a dread in the soft filling of his bones, the suckable part, approaching Galveston now.

AUTUMNAL Pale amber sunlight falls across The reddening October trees, That hardly sway before a breeze As soft as summer: summer's loss Seems little, dear! on days like these. Let misty autumn be our part! The twilight of the year is sweet: Where shadow and the darkness meet Our love, a twilight of the heart Eludes a little time's deceit. Are we not better and at home In dreamful Autumn, we who deem No harvest joy is worth a dream? A little while and night shall come, A little while, then, let us dream. Beyond the pearled horizons lie Winter and night: awaiting these We garner this poor hour of ease, Until love turn from us and die Beneath the drear November trees.

RELUCTANCEOut through the fields and the woods And over the walls I have wended;I have climbed the hills of view And looked at the world, and descended;I have come by the highway home, And lo, it is ended.The leaves are all dead on the ground, Save those that the oak is keepingTo ravel them one by one And let them go scraping and creepingOut over the crusted snow, When others are sleeping.And the dead leaves lie huddled and still, No longer blown hither and thither;The last lone aster is gone; The flowers of the witch hazel wither;The heart is still aching to seek, But the feet question ‘Whither?’Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treasonTo go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason,And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?

The summer ended. Day by day, and taking its time, the summer ended. The noises in the street began to change, diminish, voices became fewer, the music sparse. Daily, blocks and blocks of children were spirited away. Grownups retreated from the streets, into the houses. Adolescents moved from the sidewalk to the stoop to the hallway to the stairs, and rooftops were abandoned. Such trees as there were allowed their leaves to fall - they fell unnoticed - seeming to promise, not without bitterness, to endure another year. At night, from a distance, the parks and playgrounds seemed inhabited by fireflies, and the night came sooner, inched in closer, fell with a greater weight. The sound of the alarm clock conquered the sound of the tambourine, the houses put on their winter faces. The houses stared down a bitter landscape, seeming, not without bitterness, to have resolved to endure another year.

No sun—no moon! No morn—no noon—No dawn— No sky—no earthly view— No distance looking blue—No road—no street—no "t'other side the way"— No end to any Row— No indications where the Crescents go— No top to any steeple—No recognitions of familiar people— No courtesies for showing 'em— No knowing 'em!No traveling at all—no locomotion,No inkling of the way—no notion— "No go"—by land or ocean— No mail—no post— No news from any foreign coast—No park—no ring—no afternoon gentility— No company—no nobility—No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member—No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, November!

In my own shire, if I was sadHomely comforters I had:The earth, because my heart was sore,Sorrowed for the son she bore;And standing hills, long to remain,Shared their short-lived comrade's pain.And bound for the same bourn as I,On every road I wandered by,Trod beside me, close and dear,The beautiful and death-struck year:Whether in the woodland brownI heard the beechnut rustle down,And saw the purple crocus paleFlower about the autumn dale;Or littering far the fields of MayLady-smocks a-bleaching lay,And like a skylit water stoodThe bluebells in the azured wood. Yonder, lightening other loads,The season range the country roads,But here in London streets I kenNo such helpmates, only men;And these are not in plight to bear,If they would, another's care.They have enough as 'tis: I seeIn many an eye that measures meThe mortal sickness of a mindToo unhappy to be kind.Undone with misery, all they canIs to hate their fellow man;And till they drop they needs must stillLook at you and wish you ill.

Meanwhile the colonel followed the mad woman, and by a strange effect of the superexcitation of his senses, saw her in the darkness, through the mist, as plainly as in broad daylight; he heard her sighs, her confused words, in spite of the continual moan of the autumn winds rushing through the deserted streets. A few late townspeople, the collars of their coats raised to the level of their ears, their hands in their pockets, and their hats pressed down over their eyes, passed, at infrequent intervals, along the pavements; doors were heard to shut with a crash. An ill-fastened shutter banged against a wall, a tile torn from a housetop by the wind fell into the street; then, again, the immense torrent of air whirled on its course, drowning with its lugubrious voice all other sounds of the night.It was one of those cold nights at the end of October, when the weathercocks, shaken by the north wind, turn giddily on the high roofs, and cry with shrilly voices, 'Winter! - Winter! - Winter is come!' ("The Child Stealer")

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)

When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.("The Basilisk")

The first sorrow of autumn is the slow good-bye of the garden that stands so long in the evening—a brown poppy head, the stalk of a lily, and still cannot go.The second sorrow is the empty feet of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers. The woodland of gold is folded in feathers with its head in a bag.And the third sorrow is the slow good-bye of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers the minutes of evening, the golden and holy ground of the picture.The fourth sorrow is the pond gone black, ruined, and sunken the city of water—the beetle's palace, the catacombs of the dragonfly.And the fifth sorrow is the slow good-bye of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp. One day it's gone. It has only left litter—firewood, tent poles.And the sixth sorrow is the fox's sorrow, the joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds, the hooves that pound; till earth closes her ear to the fox's prayer.And the seventh sorrow is the slow good-bye of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window as the year packs up like a tatty fairground that came for the children.

This was hers and hers alone. Forevermore. Or at least so I thought… but shit didn’t work out that way, and then you came along… and circle be damned, I don’t want to be finished with you.” Now it was her turn to feel poleaxed, her body going numb as she struggled to comprehend what he was saying. “Autumn, I’m in love with you—that’s why I came here tonight. And we don’t have to be together, and you don’t have to get over what I said, but I wanted you to hear that from me. And I also want to tell you that I’m at peace with it, because…” He took a deep breath. “You want to know why Wellsie got pregnant? It wasn’t because I wanted a young. It’s because she knew that every night when I left the house I could get killed in the field, and as she said, she wanted something to keep on living for. If I had been the one to go? She would have carved out a life for herself, and… the strange thing is, I would have wanted her to do that. Even if it included someone else. I guess I’ve realized that… she wouldn’t have wanted me to mourn her forever. She’d have wanted me to move on… and I have.