Books are a forest and it’s hard to see the trees, except the tall ones or the old ones. But when you enter the forest, it’s the new growth that emits the sunlight....

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Photo posts of autumn color (and free Kindle books!)




*Josiah’s Apple Orchard, MG novel, will be FREE Kindle Oct. 16-21.*






*The House in Windward Leaves, Halloween-time fantasy, will be FREE Kindle from Oct. 29 to Nov. 2*




An enchanted entrance







My one-act play, “The Lawn Auction” is published in Mused Literary Review’s Fall Equinox issue.   The journal is part of BellaOnline, a much-visited site for women and their concerns.  I've read the whole issue and found poems, fiction, and nonfiction that I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Wide Awake Loons is being re-published.




The Lake Superior shore region is known for its fall color.  When I was growing up in Southern Minnesota, our next door neighbors took a trip up to Duluth every fall just to see the trees turning color.   We were in school and never could take that in.  Since moving to Duluth, I have marveled at Indian summer here.  I take pictures every year, and admire trees from my windows that are just plain breath-taking.  This year, I’m putting pictures in this blog post. 








Decoration for the evergreen








 
The boulevard trees arching are scheduled to be removed for blocks due to road & sewer pipe improvement.


 
Mountain ash
The yellow leaf road

My new banner at Facebook




























When I lived in Minneapolis, I wrote this poem.  It was published in Rio Number 14 in 2004, online.





On a day when a maple leaf
is really a flower

Last walk in harpstring hues
tousled by the yellowing
palms of trees.  This day was
borrowed from August.

In other chameleon trees, fire
supplies mood but not the balm.
I gasp too at fall’s rude turmoil,
at petals imploding like dresses
exposing crooked legs.  Some
bloom backwards, stuck on a
perverse carousel around houses,
papery-soft like widows with tissues.
Squashed are most.  Appallingly
their mauves are trampled.
Striped petunias put up a
frilled front, looking less ruined.


I pass a huge sidewalk blossom.
A flamingo flower strung in
pink from the sky.  Billowed
as poppymallow, silky as
tiger lilly - maple leaf?

I picked the leaf, passed
the foundering flowers.  Picked
a laugh bluffing about maples
and meanings.  What’s in flower?
What’s dying flame?  What
isn’t borrowed?

Next day I check the maple flower
between leaves of an unborrowed
book.  It has flared, crinkled
to its capillaries, gauntly as
an octogenarian’s face.  Today
fall fell chill.  This is a leaf
the shape of a sunstorm
the flamboyance of a maple
defying definition to the death.





Clouds can be astonishing too.