The weight of fall has been gathering,
filling slowly both light and air.
Things are not so fast. They ripen.
The many pairs of spotted fawns
don’t keep quite as close an eye on mama,
their distance from her growing.
Yellow jackets, more and more of them, rise
in a procedural fury.
Apples reddening up, one-sided, drop
when a jay drills his beak into their flesh.
The glass marble roll of hummingbird song comes
often to my ears, to those of the abundant flowers
even as grasses brown.
A deer at wooden fence line rises again and again
on hind legs for grapes now earthen purple.
Her narrow mouth pulls them down,
teeth crushing juice from plump globes.
She knows where the goods lie.