Composed from Seasons

The year turns its face toward the window and I see it: autumn has come to the mountains, the roads are the colour of wet copper, the fields have given up their fruit and the trees are holding nothing.

I am in the kitchen. The kettle is on. The kitchen is the size of one season and the season is autumn and autumn is the colour of staying.

On the plate: grapes, a pear, a split pomegranate, the last tomato from the garden that refused to ripen and was sweet anyway. On the plate: a mushroom from the wet field, a walnut cracked open by the frost, a fig that will not last the week.

The plate is a face if you look long enough. The grapevine is the hair. The pear is the nose. The mushroom is the ear that heard the rain coming two hours before it arrived.

I did not sweep the path. The path grew over in one season and the weeds were not weeds but the land returning to itself.

Outside: a door stands in the field. It was not there yesterday. It opens onto winter.

I do not go through it yet.

I am composed from the seasons that brought me here: the spring that broke the ground, the summer that burned the shoulders of the hills, the autumn that wounded the maple trees and made them more beautiful for the wounding, the winter that is coming and will show what the other seasons hid.

I am composed from what the year gave. I am composed from what the year took. The plate is mine. The face on the plate is mine. The season is the face and the face is the season and I am still here.