“The autumn shade is thin. Grey leaves lie faint
Where they will lie, and, where the thick green was,
Light stands up, like a presence, to the sky.
The trees seem merely shadows of its age.
 

 
 
“Nights grow colder. The Hunter and the Bear
Follow their tranquil course outside my window.
I feel the gentian waiting in the wood,
Blossoms waxy and blue, and blue-green stems
of the amaryllis waiting in the garden.
 
 
 
 
 
 
“I know, as though I waited what they wait,
The cold that fastens ice about the root,
A heavenly form, the same in all its changes,
Inimitable, terrible, and still,
And beautiful as frost.
 
 
 
 
 
“Fire warms my room.
Its light declares my books and pictures. Gently,
A dead soprano sings Mozart and Bach.
I drink bourbon, then go to bed, and sleep
In the Promethean heat of summer’s essence.”
— excerpts from Autumn Shade, Edgar Bowers
 
 
 
 
 
“All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!”
— excerpt from Winter Trees, William Carlos Williams
 
 
 
Photos by Sandra Peterson Ramirez