Seasons of the Abyss

The day moves so slowly
Frozen in it's breath
Sun goes down so lonely
In the distant frosty west

Cold, malevolent winds are blowing
All hope has gone away
While fading life is flowing
Into a wintry, snowy haze

Icicles frozen in time
A snow angel spreads her wings to fly
Church bells and gongs chime
Hands reach out into a crystal winter sky

It is the season of choice.
The season I find my love.
Where embers thaw and burn.

Bring me into your season.
Into warm nights of passion.
Where passion ignites senses.

Make me feel your season.
Into warm and sweaty embraces.
Where embracing smolders red hot.

Make me love and hate your season.
Love that summer of wet lips pressing.
Hate that winter of letting go.

At last, she arrives in splendour,  
bringing her constellation of colours:  
green shoots, white-pink blossom.  
golden daffodils, purple crocuses  
and even, after false starts,  
an azure sky.  
As new life beckons,  
something awakens within me.  
Although everything has its season,  
the darkness never lasts  
and Spring is just part of the cycle,  
the promise of heat and light and hope  
buoys me, and I breathe a little easier.  

 

When they have their own work to get through
and mother takes a heavy blow for all of them?

I guess we'll sit playing pretend
like none of this is happening

as seasons become fluid
and keep melting ice caps.

John Denver saw fire in the Colorado sky, but I've seen it in the trees of New England and didn’t need to be high to see it.
 
The smell of a sultry summer field as it yielded its annual organic essence to a foggy September morning. The cemetery where rests my ancestry, deeply ensconced in the vineyards near Dundee and Glen Eden. The smell of the catawbas would approach sensory overload at this time of year. An exceptionally warm day just after duck season, kayaking around the abandoned blinds in the marshes at the north end of Cayuga Lake. Taking that last swim if you were still feeling virile enough, and recollecting the first day you got in that year. A weekend cruising the cheese and syrup farms in Vermont, the apex of which was enjoying a smoky kick-ass breakfast of waffles & bacon, outside on the porch while bathing in the seasons ambiance. A dismally dark Thanksgiving afternoon where I was the only one left on my college campus. It was that afternoon when I first heard Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei. Being transfixed by it, I determined then that if circumstances allow, I would listen to it as I awaken from life's transient dream.
 
Now living half a planet away, these and many other autumnal moments are buried deeply in my bosom, and I nurse them tenderly whenever they come to the surface. Only so many clever words can be conjured up from the well where they reside. I've always envisioned fall to be like the days before the biblical flood where they say that people lived to be 900 something and the haze perpetually filtered out the UV rays. During the less hot months here, I can catch a faint likeness in the air that takes me to a visceral memory not unlike these.  I never gave it a thought that autumn reverie would not be there for me to re-calibrate myself with. But  that's OK because I like it here too.