It is the end of summer.
The air is white,
fields dry like burned lakes.
Wheat is ripening
with the odor of grainy dust.
I do not know
what to do with myself.
Autumn is hinted at
in the yellow haze of the trees.
A powder coming from the drought.
I will travel to Rome in a few weeks.
See the rocky hillsides of the Apian Way.
Buy trinkets at the Vatican.
How will fall show itself there?
Rome in summer’s last hurrah.
Will it glow with the flame
of an Ohio autumn?
In the dawn of a cool sunrise,
an epiphany of remoteness,
my heart full of openings,
letting a breeze come through,
on a day like the first coast
I’d ever seen?
My feet cold in the water,
avoiding the green dapples of slime
on the rocks,
gloriously alive,
remembering the deep land
of my youth,
full of roads and bridges,
coming alive in the fall,
tasting the fruit of a whole summer
in my hands?