She is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous
like golden leaves in this glowing season, lit from within.
She is like a brown dog nosing at the smell of earth
and sniffing at voices above the folded hillsides rising
like smoke, and the moon echoing in cobbled walkways
tread by leather shoes, and the smell of work horses,
and wooden barns filled with sweetly sleeping swallows
that startle and rise like leaves cast by the wind.

And on these fall days her voice is strong and a little rough,
like newly sawn pine, and she will look right into your eyes
as if you were the landscape reflected in a silent lake,
as if you were the season turning in a single storm and she
the dawn slanting across the brown and broken fields
on a chill November morning. And she will stride through the
rows of rattling cornstalks, gathering and spilling light because
she is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous.

(From Archaeologies of Memory, a work in progress.)

The above image of High Park in the fall was taken by Neil Lee and is used under the aegis of a Creative Commons license.