Ex Libris

By the stream, where the ground is soft and gives, under the slightest pressure—even the fly would leave its footprint here and the paw of the shrew the crescent of its claws like the strokes of a chisel in clay; where the lightest chill, lighter than the least rumor of winter, sets the reeds to a kind of speaking, and a single drop of rain leaves a crater to catch the first silver glint of sun when the clouds slide away from each other like two tired lovers, and the light returns, pale, though brightened by the last chapter of late autumn: copper, rusted oak, gold aspen, and the red pages of maple, the wind leafing through to the end the annals of beech, the slim volumes of birch, the elegant script of the ferns ... for the birds, it is all notations for a coda, for the otter an invitation to the river, and for the deer—a dream in which to disappear, light-footed on the still open book of earth, adding the marks of their passage, adding it all in, waiting only for the first thick flurry of snowflakes for cover, soft cover that carries no title, no name.