Autumn Sky

Influences – Train ride to London reading Wolf Totem – Jiang Rong

Autumn evening skies are black with night, an almost comforting black, the kind that proceeds the cold of winter. In the early purple evening, stars wake up, companions to walk home with. Later their beautiful litter seeps through closed windows as the world slips into night. All this after a late afternoon sun set, a tepid pallet which highlights the enormity of the sky, scattered clouds perspectives slashed with aviation trails.

A gentle cold that condenses breath to white cloud wonderlands. No summer sun to stew the jogger, just that morning autumn air, not yet cold enough to burn lungs but cold enough to create those mysterious wonderlands. The winds breath a sudden bite after it's summer caress.

It's the commute home for many, stranded many lane motorways, clogged with lights both red and white. Like serpents that writhe across fields, passed skeletal trees and huggled thorny bushes. Asphalt loneliness and dreams of a warm dinner. Possibly lasagne or stew and dumplings or roasted squash soup with chilli and bread. An embrace for the lucky a microwave for the lonely.

Hedge fruits, red or black or oaken and hovering birds, rodents collecting for the months ahead. The last of summers elegance caught in the orange and yellow and purple memory of leaves. A temporary death, a hibernation of green, a spiders dream whose web glistens with morning dew in slanted dawn light.

The death of summer is beautiful, a last breath of grace before the barrenness of winter, whose desolation is so complete it can breed hope of the spring and summer to come.