WHAT IT’S LIKE TO SEE FALL FOR THE FIRST TIME IN FIFTEEN YEARS

Hugging the window/seat on the 61C, early morning, late for work but earlier than I ever saw life in Brooklyn on anything like a daily basis, even counting the time I was treating myself like an old lady and getting up to go sit on a bench and expose my arms to the earliest possible morning sunlight in McGorlick Park or my fire escape, hoping the indications of poor liver functioning (spots on my hands, spots across my eyesight, mild depression) would disappear.

This morning, peering sleep-eyed out of the window of the 61C bus, lumbering down Forbes Avenue, I woke to a golden sidewalk and a tree who couldn’t wait to get rid of his leaves, with no help from any windstorm. Not like the SIDEWAYS rain on Saturday, I’m on the seventh floor and can vouch, it rained horizontally and then the clouds blew away just as quickly as they came, with the same wind, and what was black and grey and ominous as far as the eye could see was sudden blue and white, puffy white, sunny blue, Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm blue, Jewish jazz hotel in the sky above Murray Avenue blue. The sideways rain on Saturday blew away, Thomas says, SOME of the beauty of Frick Park in the fall, Thomas who walked through that silent sanctuary alone on Saturday morning bearing the weight of a birthday offering for me, and the shop keeper on Braddock Ave wouldn’t believe him that he was walking all the way home with such a weight. Frick Park, gorgeous gorge which still, though, offered us an autumn ceiling of gold leaf with some wet-black branches thrown across the scene like calligraphy strokes, on Sunday Frick Park was still there and even though we weren’t totally alone in my lover’s Saturday sanctuary, the sky was a ceiling for us walking through; the sky was gold.

Tree on Forbes Avenue this morning which wasn’t waiting for the wind, was just saying ENOUGH!, it’s a time to lose parts of me, it’s a time to pour leaves straight down like tears, like dead skin, like hair that looses invisibly as I walk, like visible gravity, raining bright not post-ripe yellow until sidewalk and yard are covered. Not post-ripe yellow nor like Brooklyn trees just crumbling dry brown and falling dead, this tree was saying, I am alive and still it is time to pour leaves like tears, it is time to shed clothing like armour that keeps me from knowing you, it is time to shed yellow like a color I used to horde, it’s time to rain golden five points and carpet your walk past me, beneath me, up to me reaching me.