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Relay
October: daylight narrowing like an eye. Now for the sunless season-long nights, gray days of permanent twilight. But for now big yellow leaves glow down still parted and pushed like hair upon black branches that release them, glow up from the ground they cover, making a yellow place to pause in, invoking sun where no sun is, beside the waterways. To ease us in. High seasonal winds risen like the tide crinkle this inlet's foil surface west, against its slow prevailing current, away from the open sea. Coot, hadn't you better come out of that? How can he stand it? His poor webs must be numb, oak-leaf scallops clutching footfuls of choppy ice-pale lake. He's not dunking today, anyway. Other coots paddle past, but the subdued mallards, bills clenched to breasts, float immobilized behind backwater- windbreaks of tufted reeds like Moses in his basket; at the thought of the little orange leaf-shapes dangling down under them in the murk, my eyebrows ache. Lobed oak, triple-toebone webbed maple- tons of bushels of leaves the wind dumps here along the long canal bank, to be sunk deep or worked into the floating faded mats of linden leaves. One day soon, if they happen to look up, these huddled ducks will see through stripped black branches as if through lashes how the tall trees have lapsed, exposing each its crow or two and cold squirrel's nest like a snarl at the crown; will waddle past those drowned footprints, pressing leafprints in snow: webbed, with three branching veins. Soon. And on that day an owl's amber eye, if you can ever catch it, will show you the only yellow light left in this world. Sun into leaf; sun to moon to owl- glare. November's heavy lid, lowering.