If that bird muttered with an old man’s throat.

Hooray for the approach of fall.  I sat outside today at my local cafe, feeling urban and writerly as I drank a cappuccino and a glass of red wine and wrote in my notebook.  It turned out that I filled up the notebook, writing the last three pages, which feels like an ending, but also a beginning, which is the way fall feels to me. It was nearly 90 today in Chicago, and as I wrote I heard the whap whap whop of people walking by in their flip-flops. But the elm tree in my front yard knows what's coming, it is already shedding some brown saw-edged leaves.  Tonight I am fiddling with a manuscript.  Here's a poem from it that feels (to me) like a fall poem:

Postcard for the Soul That at Last Became a Bird

Consider

a warm afternoon:

a crow

stalks the shade beneath

a sycamore tree,

picking

at some kind of meat

in the grass.  If

your soul

became a bird.

If that bird muttered

with an old man’s

throat.  If there’s a soul.

If the crow

found a treasure,

a beakful, a bone.

The soul’s search,

the crow’s

hunger.  The luck

of the scrap. The force

of the stab.

The pluck and rasp

of those black

scissors. Crows,

their voices. Crows

in the branches

like a wicked boys choir.