[Image: “Footbridge: The Shape of Autumn,” by John E. Simpson.]

A few days ago, whiskey river shared a fragment of a poem (the italicized lines below) ostensibly about autumn — but, like many, many descriptions of the seasons, actually speaking of deeper mysteries, and deeper rhythms:

Spirit Birds

The spirit world the negative of this one,
soft outlines of soft whites against soft darks,
someone crossing Broadway at Cathedral, walking
toward the god taking the picture, but now,
inside the camera, suddenly still. Or the spirit
world the detail through the window, manifest
if stared at long enough, the shapes of this
or that, the lights left on, the lights turned off,
the spirits under arcs of sycamores the gray-gold
mists of migratory birds and spotted leaves recognize.

Autumnal evening chill, knife-edges of the avenues,
wind kicking up newspaper off the street,
those ghost peripheral moments you catch yourself
beside yourself going down a stair or through
a door—the spirit world surprising: those birds,
for instance, bursting from the trees and turning
into shadow, then nothing, like spirit birds
called back to life from memory or a book,
those shadows in my hands I held, surprised.
I found them interspersed among the posthumous pages

of a friend, some hundreds of saved poems: dun
sparrows and a few lyrical wrens in photocopied
profile perched in air, focused on an abstract
abrupt edge. Blurred, their natural color bled,
they’d passed from one world to another: the poems,
too, sung in the twilit middle of the night, loved,
half-typed, half-written-over, flawed, images
of images. He’d kept them to forget them.
And every twenty pages, in xerox ash-and-frost,
Gray Eastern, Gold Western, ranging across borders.

(Stanley Plumly [source])

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading a fantasy series called Edinburgh Nights, by T.L. Huchu; it recounts, in a lively first-person voice, the adventures of a teenage “ghostalker” in an alternate-timeline Edinburgh. Ropa Moyo helps the dead resolve their unfinished life’s business by bearing messages — for a fee! — between them and their loved ones back in the real world. She recounts her understanding of all this as follows (this excerpt, course, not come from whiskey river):

…back when I was still learning kitchen table magic from Gran, I used to believe that there was this invisible thread that tied the soul to the body so it could always be reeled back in like a trout on a line. Now I know that’s old fishwives’ bollocks. Scientifically, the soul and the body are “entangled” in a manner analogous to the quantum entanglement of subatomic particles. As such, no matter how far apart they may be, there’s an instantaneous communication going. If the body dies, the soul’s stuck out there drifting with no way back, but if the soul dies, well, it’s kaput for the body too.

(T.L. Huchu [source])

Three years ago, for The Missus and me, autumn had assumed the shape of a vague but promising precursor to our grand European tour in the following spring: EuroTour2020, I called it. Only a few months later, but certainly by two autumns ago, well — duh — Things Had Changed: we felt blessed to escape, even for just a long weekend, to the mountains of western North Carolina. By this time last year, we could see how the end of our RoadTrip2021 (on the way to RoadTrip2022) was shaping up: as a cascade of destinations (New York, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, with brief detours to New Jersey and Florida) across the country.

…and now here we are back in North Carolina, in one place for at least a few months, trying to fashion from the clay of geography and personal economics something like a future.

I’ll offer you this observation, gratuitously, about autumn in your 70s: it’s shaped nothing at all like the autumns of your youth.