Indian Summer, winter’s false flag. A record 80° and a few late
wildflowers. These trees going off all at once in colors of embers and this crisp
crush of new leaf litter bright as firecoals underfoot are the only things giving
the lie to fall’s pretty fraud. Of course, it’s all downhill from here.
I suppose to some people maybe that might mean an easy run, a few effortless changes
of scene one after another then the home stretch wide open with the finish line only
a few strides away. It could just as easily mean exile from Eden, Furies descending,
barbarian hordes battering the city gates, plague years. Fulfillment and oblivion.
Time and time again
that inconspicuous onset of corruption
It is still argued in some circles that Wallace Stegner plagiarized Mary Hallock
Foote’s diaries to create Angle of Repose. The book won the Pulitzer
Prize in 1972. It has since been praised by a couple of generations of strictly
academic readers and critics as the best novel of the American West ever written.
A ripoff? Looks like. But it can’t have been as simple as that. It never is.
The deception, if that’s what it was, overtook him gradually, one little
impulse, one little rationalization, one little encouraging outcome at a time.
Then he was caught up. Is it still a Masterpiece? In its narrow niche, maybe.
Doesn’t matter really. Nobody reads it anymore.
memory
regret and inertia
then a sky swirling with starlings
Did you know that if everything is very, very still, you can hear a leaf fall from
the canopy, hear the click, tap, clack it makes as it strikes bare branches
on the way down? It is a comfort, too, to realize a stone can only roll so far.
On those shallow slopes near the bottom, things cease to slide away. And moss has
its chance.
all reds
sifted through thin cirrus
an evening sky’s welcome colophon
is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a nominee for Sundress Press’ Best of the
Web Anthology. His haibun “El Paso: July” was selected by Robert
Olen Butler for inclusion in The Best Small Fictions 2015 (Queen’s
Ferry Press). His new collection An Atlas of the Interior: Small Narratives
and Lyrics will be available from Hyperborea Publishing in 2016. He is a Senior
Lecturer in English at Assumption University of Thailand in Bangkok.
www.jeffstreebyauthorizedsite.com
