Annie Finch

Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, now you are uncurled and cover our eyes with the edge of winter sky leaning over us in icy stars. Vines, leaves, roots of darkness, growing, come with your seasons, your fullness, your end.

She turned to gold and fell in love. She danced life upside down. She opened her wild eyes again and asked some strangers in. The strangers felt her in and out. They found her outsides thin. Since her heart was still and hard, they knocked her insides in.

(The Celtic Halloween) In the season leaves should love, since it gives them leave to move through the wind, towards the ground they were watching while they hung, legend says there is a seam stitching darkness like a name. Now when dying grasses veil earth from the sky in one last pale wave, as autumn dies to bring winter back, and then the spring, we who die ourselves can peel back another kind of veil that hangs among us like thick smoke. Tonight at last I feel it shake. I feel the nights stretching away thousands long behind the days till they reach the darkness where all of me is ancestor. I move my hand and feel a touch move with me, and when I brush my own mind across another, I am with my mother's mother. Sure as footsteps in my waiting self, I find her, and she brings arms that carry answers for me, intimate, a waiting bounty. "Carry me." She leaves this trail through a shudder of the veil, and leaves, like amber where she stays, a gift for her perpetual gaze.

My mind hovered over my baby, like a raptor, and froze everything it saw. I looked through my own pregnant belly's raw perimeters and found his heart to strike attentive until, helpless with the pound of still more blood, he seemed to settle down. It was my loss to feel like god alone for a new one always listening, to reach inside for his ears to share the flying speech I heard so constantly. Within my grown silence, my sounding, my loud body where the baby turned, my mind learned not to care whether thoughts I felt he noticed with no fear were mine alone—or whether he could hear.

Moon has dusks for walls, October’s days for a floor, crickets for rooms, windy halls. Only one night is her door. When I was thirteen she found me, spiralled into my blood like a hive. I stood on a porch where she wound me for the first time, tight and alive, till my body flooded to find her: to know I would not be alone as I moved through the tides that don't bind her into womanhood, like a flung stone. With each curve that waxed into fullness I grew to her, ready and wild. I filled myself up like her priestess. I emptied myself like her child. Flooding, ready, and certain, I hid her—full, fallow, or frail— beneath each long summer's rich curtain. It covered her face—the thin grail that delivers me now. Now I’m with her. All cast shadows come home. I stand in these shadows to kiss her; I spin in her cool, calming storm. Now as I move through my own beauty and my shadow grows deeper than blood, oh triple, oh goddess, sustain me with your light’s simple opening hood.

For Mabon (fall equinox), Sept. 21 Our voices press from us and twine around the year's fermenting wine

That hour-glass-backed, orchard-legged, heavy-headed will, paper-folded, wedge-contorted, savage—dense to kill— pulls back on backward-moving, arching high legs still, lowered through a deep, knees-reaching, feathered down green will, antenna-honest, thread-descending, carpeted as if with skill, a focus-changing, sober-reaching, tracing, killing will.

You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven and let new tension climb around your shoulders, thinking you've found the trick for going mad. But try to keep a grip on where you are. Remember: all around you is pure city; try to stay alert. On the wide streets, so empty late at night, streaking in glass, the color of an alley, or the fall of a sideways flicker from a neon sign may utterly and briefly disconcert you— but as you go, you'll find that noise is worse. Prepare for noise. But never scream. Even tensing ears too far in advance can sharpen sirens, and as for horns. ... When you're back to your normal rhythm after such encounters, just try to stay alert. You'll never know exactly who is coming up behind you, but the sudden movement of pedestrians will finally, of course, be what disarms you.

Venice, December Ours are the only mouths to taste with this smothering slow touch, and the only steps to sink like bellsounds and cave deep into the marble snow. Women who go to the window to push their arms out to the snow and then bring the shutters back in follow us as we fall past their eyes where the black night lives. We are snowflakes at last, as the thick never locked, never closed doors follow us through squares of light their windows have left on the snow. Once again, warmth that falls, again, though our tracks fill and slow.

Maple leaves turn black in the courtyard. Light drives lower and one bluejay crams our cold memories out past the sun, each time your traces come past the shadows and visit under my looking-glass fingers that lift and block out the sun. Come—I’ll trace you one final autumn, and you can trace your last homecoming into the snow or the sun.