A Fall Evening

Three blocks away, from my home on Lexington, is the Olmsted and Vaux way. On 72nd Street, where Bethesda Fountain and Darwin's Bust meet along a curvaceous jugular. The water spins on stone, gurgling and splashing along boats that drift along a display of round lotus pads.

A colonnade with pollarded trees, birches and magnolia blooms, sunlight streaming through a mesh of Eucalyptus branches, sits like a phonograph at the toe of the Meadow, bearing troubles and tragedies of 9/11, John F. Kennedy, and Lebanese tourists. 

And I sit to watch the sunset. The summer night has passed. The indigo has melted into a can of early darkness. 

The sun floats from the very top of me to the right, where I sit, facing a businessman arguing on his telephone, unveiling with its very movement a diaphanous veil. 

The clouds, like orange rinds, slosh across an Autumn sky, as the sun, the color of cantaloupe, drifts behind. The air whistles. The birds chirp. Lights from sky scrapers glitter at a distance. And the sky, ink-blue, with clouds around the edges, bundle above a pale horizon where Summer is asleep.

The orange turns pink, then an eggplant purple. Fireflies dance along low lying shrubs, like a gymnasium of pearls. Like flames of lanterns, translucent like lozenge, and refractive like crystal. Ululating in a buzz, as grasshoppers chyme and katydids lisp ballads to the moon.

The indigo percolates through the clouds, until it is black all around. And still. And people walk using flashlights. Police cars make rounds. The viola player stays. The soprano sings to a lithograph of Bela Fleck and Washburn. And I read dedication plaques, the metal cool from the sunset. I reminisce your smile, a crochet design over the cushion cover, and a snippet from your letter that read 'I know that you are a kind, giving man...' Tears burst through the traffic of blood around my eyes. And I am at once bawling. Howling across the fountain, where the saxophonist has paused for a sip of cold soda. I have only taken. Given nothing since I have moved. For which I am immediately ashamed. 

The orange and purple and blue and indigo have slipped away to a different country, where orphans, maybe, are flying kites. Where fishermen are sowing nets or are mired in prayers. Where a museum  is dark. Or a daughter knits garlands of camellias and tube roses. The blue nights are gone and the days are shorter. The rustling of red leaves have gotten louder and louder. The cycle of seasons is now at the cusp of temperatures, casting whispers to trees and hands of clocks. 

An Autumn Night - the sounds within, fold and refold into threads of a Taffeta ribbon, spindling along the circles of a sensible tongue. So plush and cosy, the skies seem soft, and fragrant from spices in nearby households. The orange clouds raw, diffuse into the geometry of constellations, into a night sky of jewels, where stars twinkle, and lights from air planes sprint across. And I walk back home. Filled with a sense of wonderment. Content and peaceful. And at ease.