Circle

The trees in October wear their deaths thickly,

wound around them like some heavy coat,

brassy leaves clinging like burnt feathers,

their edges curled, scorched by light.

Each trunk a pillar of time, counting and counting,

decades of rot, root, ring.

Here, the forest stares you down,

unblinking in the low sun.

You are something small, brief,

a pulse against this ancient quiet,

the leaves rustling around your feet

as if marking the beat of something that endures.

The light bruises its way through branches,

shadows slashing down like axes.

This is where it begins and ends, endlessly,

death bleeding life, life swallowing death.

The dark arms of trees arch up, lean in,

as if they could draw back the seasons,

reel in the wind’s wild spooling,

hold each leaf against the slow loss of green.

They drop it all. One leaf, two, three, a thousand,

down and down in spirals,

the ground taking them back, hungrily,

the damp earth lapping them up like stories.

I stand still in the weight of it,

this world of endings feeding beginnings,

a wheel turning, and all I know is to watch it,

the blood and bone of autumn’s hunt,

the trees whispering their way back into the earth.