FAREWELL TO A SEASON

End of Summer

There is a hollow sadness 
that seems to cradle the end of summer. 
The long days are waning, 
the yawning sun 
is casting shadows 
that slowly stretch across the weary burn 
of empty fields, 
reaching towards a promise 
of cooler regions.

Greedy blackbirds 
pick through the remnants 
of broken days, 
scouring a drooping shrug of trees,
ravaging the overripe fruit, 
savoring the last sweet drops 
of what once was a golden bounty.

All the busy places
that you thought you knew 
have suddenly stopped to listen, 
and the silence that awaits them 
yields a pang of distant echoes,
warm memories now past.

Jon V.




These words were the beginning of a blog post I was writing last night. I thought they sounded rather poetic, so I chopped them up into haphazard lines and rendered them into the facsimile of a poem.

That's how my poetry is conceived, more or less. Brilliance has nothing to do with it.


I summoned the courage to drive to town yesterday (Friday). I got cat supplies, groceries, beer. A watermelon, a honeydew melon. That should sustain me for awhile. It was a hot day, sunny, 90 degrees. Summer still lingers in these hillbilly hills - but the atmosphere has changed, the light has changed. Autumn beckons distantly.

My holiday weekend? Nothing special. Doing necessary things, repairing things. Endless, endless things. Rearranging some furniture. Unpacking the hopeless mess of chaotic junk in the garage. Painting the kitchen cabinets.
I had thirty kitchen cabinets in my Texas house. I only have eight here. Should be a cinch.

Working on my memoir - - as if anybody gives a damn. The burden of my extraordinary existence lingers like a heavy weight and needs to be released. There are things I have to say while I still maintain a semblance of lucidity.

My initial concern, my main concern is that so many people who touched my life are still alive. There are risks in offering the details of your life for public consumption - dangerous risks. True identities must be well-concealed. I have apprehensions.

I seem to be talking to myself again, talking nonsense which is important to no one but me. Living alone in the wilderness does strange things.

A coyote ventured onto my back porch two nights ago. Ripped apart a cardboard box and some remnants of trash that I had out there. Dragged them down an embankment and left them by my car.
Coyotes were howling nearby last night for hours.

One unrelated thought:
I need to render Love Letters to Ghosts into a Kindle book. Soon. Soon, I hope.

Enjoy this last unofficial weekend of summer!

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