The First Shed Skin of Autumn

(Sept 17)

Today in Clinton my children stepped on the first shed skin of Autumn.

She’s around now. In the evening you can hear her gown dragging across the grain. I swear my wool sweaters crawled into the bedroom armoire yesterday when we were at Emmett’s ballgame. I did not see them in there all Summer.

How lovely the word senescence sounds on the tongue when I utter it to myself. How the temple scatters its failure to better enshrine the entrance.

The brown filigree turns to ash under the children’s shoes. It disintegrates into dust on the concrete sidewalk, nearly resurrected in their autumnal joy.