Let me fall

“At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne

The artist in Liza began to want to paint September: its ripeness and potential for fruit. Some days were still reminiscent of the greens of summer; some days now were briskly autumnal with their less pendulous air and the new, maddening light. She saw leaves letting go; she wanted to let go in that way, having lost some of her color and bounce. Let me fall," she would pray to herself, like a plum into the palm of universe. The ghosting of chlorophyll brought new outrageous colors; wild yellows, deeper reds, earth-ready browns. At this point in her life, she could not even throw a wilted lily or faded bouquet into the trash. I give you an Earth burial she would say to the flowers--here you go, and she would breathe in and out three slow breaths as she lay them down on the waiting ground. Rilke only spoke of the grave because so much is dying in autumn, flowers like mad artists shooting out their last leggy stems and frowzy blooms.

Liza had awakened with a start, deep in a dream that she was teaching a song to a class of nine-year-olds and had misplaced the lyrics, as the thirty or so of them patiently waited for her direction. Just as she woke, she was trying in vain to re-write them. What, in her waking life, was she trying to direct? she wondered as her shoulder pain beat her like a drum for the way she had laid upon it in sleep. Thank you for the reminder, she whispered to her shoulder. I got in the way of a knife, didn't I? Liza had literally thrown her own body between the boys, to stop the knife, to curb the violence of the streets. The knife stops here, she thought. And harrumphed to herself.

Next thought after looking in the morning mirror was Jasper. Jas. Jas driving the car, his greyish knuckles on the wheel and Jas with his wry jokes and Jas preaching and Jas floating across the church parlor in his robes. Jas sipping a hot cup of coffee, black. Jas's skin. Was a black man's skin thicker? Ah but it was his brain that pursued her, she knew. His peculiar way of looking at the world not as black & white but as mahogany or milk chocolate. A sweet mix. What do the leaves know of color? she asked herself as a tri-color birch leaf flew by her window on a gust. What shade was Jesus skin? as she brushed her teeth. Buddha's? Presumably far darker than her own wan covering. If origin defines race, we are all Africans, she concluded, as she swallowed a vitamin. We humans have invented the differences, not the Creator...never the maker of all this heartbreaking beauty.