"Story of a Light Maiden" and "Barely Autumn"

Story of the Light Maiden

(a “poetic tale”)

She gathers light and holds
it in her folded arms
the way young girls carry small animals
and bundles of wildflowers
picked on the way home from school.

She is dressed like an old-fashioned Heidi,
her golden threads of hair in braids,
her plump cheeks the color
of fresh strawberries.

The maiden disperses
vivid multicolored flecks of light
by hand onto vast fields.
I saw her one night, as if
she were sowing seeds or throwing petals
down a wedding aisle, except
she was able to cover large distances
with each sweeping motion.

She came to me later,
in the early hours of morning,
and instructed me thus:
“Your arms stretched wide,
go to an open field and ripen.”

That is all she said and,
with that, she was gone.

---

Barely Autumn

I didn't know it was autumn,
not from the rushed, stuck city scenery
or the dizzying suburbanscapes,
hardly from the mercury.
I couldn't see it or hear it or imagine it,
just barely sense it.
We have no clear seasons here,
just barely seasons.

Was the slower morning sun a clue
or my oddly impatient thoughts
of wrapping up the year,
or ozoned skies translating to autumn gray?
I can't master subtleties like those.

You'd think I'd be certain:
the neighborhood pool long
since closed on weekdays,
just barely open;
my morning walks resumed
after harsh daily blaze
and prolonged attacks of killer mosquitoes;
children's voices no longer of summer.

We have no new palette at fall's debut;
now continuous green, with faintest tarnish,
bronzes, golds arriving far too late
and the shift from leafed to dull so gradual.
Yet the TV weather guru insisted
the calendar date was not a hoax.

It's autumn, officially.
Others more in sync
could acknowledge the transition,
but someone had to tell me.