October 27

There is a cool and empty space two steps from the screen door where the sun never falls. October afternoons at two twenty-five, fire paces out her slow journey across the living room floor in a slant of nine wide lines. She glazes past dust stars, high heavens to broom closet.

Bare feet step upon the polygon of light drawn into oak like a warm bath. The labyrinth laughs in remembrance, welcomes mother heat from celestial breast.

Stepping into her lack, strength grown cool with death, and stain, and nails lies dull. Shadow-flat, plank neither reflects nor resonates, turns cross upon his cross of violet and cynic grey.

October 24

This morning I caught a choir of fog angels bathing in the Holston River. In tendrils of a thousand-fold cadence, they rinsed their arms, virgin white and shy about the shoulders. How soft they yield to the sun that absorbs them. I lingered close enough to hear them whisper, faces low and flushed with trust, "I am the Lord's servant. Let it be unto me as you say."

October

Four months ago, the hillsides tumbled green upon green. Valleys and rises were determined by a narrow spectrum of shadows and brights. More or less, the landscape was monotone, summer lazy, and supple. Confident maple leaves hung in all their twenty-something vigor, acquainted with hearty rain and heated winds, thinking they knew what there was to know.

I remembered being that age, so I didn’t laugh. Instead, I was tender, because October visits us all.

Yesterday, thrown handfuls of yellow leaves hung like stars against a navy green wood. Spots of light clung to branch with newfound brevity, sensing their weakening connection to familiarity. That which has nourished will release. In the glory of dying, in the flame of brilliance, each little golden body realized that it would pass through the womb of falling to the earth.

I beheld contrast upon contrast. Each life manifest its individuality, because this is what happens in the season of death. The green has gone, the true has come. The covering of the corporate is no longer.

Ochre grasses were painted willowy and bowing in their individual lines. There were tufts of silver grey, slices of red, bushes burning like a hearth. White seed pods cast their children upon hope of spring. Shrubs fussed over their holiday decorations, and fifteen stubborn trees held desperately to the last of their lime like thirty-nine-year-old women.

Autumn awakens. Here, depth is defined by variation.

Most of my life, I have walked among a summer’s faith where two-dimensional promises were made by a pleasant Western culture: “Jesus will perfect my marriage. Jesus will make my children wise, and strong, and moral. Jesus will help me obtain financial abundance. Jesus will make me confident, exegetically sound, and able to collect a little flock of admiring disciples. Jesus passes out health in twelve steps and truth in five points. I will walk manicured and full of my own right choices into a ripe old age of comfort.”

Perhaps. Yet often we imply that the Jesus we worship would never allow us a season of uncertainty, or vulnerability, or war. We think he wants us to be fat, full of ourselves, and sure. We know belief tumbling in summergreen strength through valleys and heights, simple and monotone, making promises of happily ever earthly after.

It is a breed of faith easy enough to manage among wealthy people expecting pleasant things. That is why the anomalies are so horrifying: sicknesses, disasters, misunderstandings, prisons of all sorts, Novembers in June. The story shouldn’t go this way, we think. Dyings are such a shock, for the Jesus we have loved is pleasant and easy, and we shop for him until we find him sold our way.

A thousand times I have read the words, but who ever believes them without October skies grown low and grey? You have died. The old has gone. The new has come. The old shell must be sucked of its green juices and tumble down, resigned to the contrast. For there is another world, and it is often winter here when spring there rises.

The veins of fallen leaves read like hymns, yellow-running, red, and holy. They are prophets of a new dimension.

My life is gone.

Behold what is left:

Brilliance.

On Cleaning House - Number 3, "The Tidy Maker"

Sitting among little boy clothes handed down twice,
I have managed to assign each stack a party title:

Hello! My name is: Too Small 2T’s
Hello! My name is: Just Right 3T’s
Hello! My name is: 5T ‘s, But Only Shirts

Three random Size 7’s sit like wallflowers near the door,
their turn will come.

Size sevens.

If I hadn’t been through this twice before, I would think it impossible.
In a way, I still do.
A size seven held by the waist looks like a little man.
But then I unpack the bulldog pajama bottoms that were impossible last winter.
Today I put them in his drawer.

Every October, green leaves change to red,
and I drive by as if it weren’t a life-stopping miracle,
for aging is always terrifying and miraculous.

Some of the knees on the pants I pack away aren’t worn enough to suit me.
"Little boys should have worn out knees," I remind myself,
I know this, and I take it as a rebuke.
Tomorrow we will go to the park.

Secretly, I want this whole room to be orderly.
I want my children to grow up with ironed sheets,
sweet dreams,
and a hot breakfast.

For I am the tidy maker.
Also the calendar.
The one who notices hair needing washing.
The immunizer.
These are a thousand labor pains harder than the first,
for I would more naturally revel
than maintain.

Teenage clothes are thrown on the bed next over.
There are soccer jerseys and t-shirts with quirky pictures.
Private jokes scrawled on notebook paper thumbtacked to the wall.
Lately this room takes on the shape
of someone beginning to live elsewhere.
His clothes are bigger than I am.

Sitting among the piles,
I push down a great grief of loss.
Inadequacy.
Fear.
A love that compresses all the breath in my chest.

Defenseless,
I hold a soft, yellow, outgrown sweatshirt to my face,
and inhale.