Fall

Spring, Winter, Summer, Fall.
It will come. It must. Even if one doesn't understand the order of it, it is there, in our blood, pulling at us. Dark forces are gathering in a distant country, entangled like storm clouds, or black tresses.
We fall, we fall...
some gently, some like leaves that spin and spiral around an invisible axis.

Why are clowns so clumsy, always falling over themselves? They make the inevitable seem accidental, and the necessary purely contingent. To make a fool of oneself, a spectacle, so that one does not see the working of the real comedy within. The clown is fooling himself! A great pretender who doesn't even, like his cousin the jester, speak truth to power.

The continuance of the world. Sun-and-wheat consciousness. The earth, with her slow rhythms and patterns dulls us. We make preparations, learn from one season to another, accumulate. Mirrors darken, flesh sags, eyes narrow and yet still we are, remarkably, indifferent to our lives and the lives of others, as they fall away. Then what? Perhaps a hand, white as porcelain, will help us up again. But:


It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender

So he thinks to himself:

sun disc
silent. warm enough
for you? all windows
alive with reflections..
air cool still
singing of first rain and
the rain drop by drop makes holes in my song
the rain the rain drop by drop
the power to be humble and clear forsook me,
this world of moods and voices around silence.
---via C, via John Riley.