Autumnal

"By now, the wind has emptied the milkweed pods. The goldenrod has gone mousy. All the leaves are down, except for a few tenacious oaks and beeches and an ornamental dogwood that is a reprise of the entire season. Each tree looks more singular — and the woods more intimate — in this bare month than in the thickness of summer. October’s memory seems a little lurid from the perspective of mid-November. The sumacs down by the road might have been reading Swinburne the way they caught fire and expired, vaingloriously, in last month’s light.

But now the drama is over, as if the year had come up hard on a plain, Puritan truth and was the better for it."

From "A Private Month" by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the N.Y. Times