Wildgoose the boy dies over and over in the autumn
leaves. Each Apache death
louder and more disorganized that the previous.
His sister, my daughter, plays Mozart's
"Divertimento No. 2" in our driveway-parked car.
Behind the windshield she looks like a silent
movie star, her mouth forming silent words:
pizzicato, allegretto, arco. Her violin bent
arm and tilted chin no longer look strange
behind the dashboard where she has insisted
on practicing this summer and fall.
"A room of my own," she calls the front seat.
Autumn's boxelder bug black and orange colors, beets'
reds. (Is there any vegetable that tastes more
like the ground it grows in than beets?)
Every season has its own taste and smell:
autumn is extreme unction. The Dairyland Twirlers
practice on the Shorewood high school football
field, their tossed and spinning batons turn to stars,
their tossed and split-legged-costumed bodies
a lovely throw of sequins on twilight. All
early evening under my not yet closed autumn
windows, people hurry walk home through
the confetti, purple-loud leaves. Soon it will be
snow shovel scrape, harps, communion white, and
salters with their orange light topped trucks
spilling blue. But sweet now is this
relic tent of leaves, lighted with all the saints:
Saint Agnes breasts in hand, Saint Antony
ringing bells and riding pigs, my son
and daughter dreaming the wild autumn children
dreams that become their bodies, become the overtures
of their holy, tumultuous, leaf blessed lives.