All posts tagged: October

Muse of the Day

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Each October I walk into the woodslooking for bones: rabbit skulls,a grackle spine, the pelvis of a deerwith the blood bleached out. What diedin the lush of roses and mintshines out from the tangle of twigsthat bind it to the placeof its last leaping. The living lackthat kind of clarity. In late April,when the water spreads out and outtill everything is lilies and seepage,there is only the mystery of tracks,a rustle receding in the many reeds.And so the bones accumulateacross my windowsill: the flightlesswings and exaggerated grins,the silent unmoving remindersof where the glories of April lead. Charles Rafferty, Where the Glories of April Lead

Muse of the Day

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October is a fine and dangerous season in America. It is dry and cool and the land is wild with red and gold and crimson, and all the lassitudes of August have seeped out of your blood, and you are full of ambition. It is a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. The names of the subjects all seem to lay open the way to a new world. Your arms are full of new, clean notebooks, waiting to be filled. You pass the doors of the library, and the smell of thousands of well-kept books makes your head swim with a clean and subtle pleasure. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

Muse of the Day

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All along the crystal cove the woven masks pace and pause from doorstep to doorstep. Shadows dance on the crest of the moon, as clouds, like dark bats, shift through the skies.The children in garments of glib disarray;the parents wear masks that won’t fade away.Olive and amber, sea and sky;salt and sand go winding by.One can sense the cries of hovering birds,the laughter of children,and frost-bitten air. Craig Froman, An owl on the moon: A journal from the edge of darkness

Muse of the Day

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There’s this smell that only exists inMilwaukee in October. The thin smoky jet of laundry after the rain. Wet leaves half-drying, half getting wet again. Open PBR cans,cigarettes, leather. A mix of youth and nostalgia, of losing somethingas you’re living it. The feeling, both terrifying and comforting, that life would alwaysbe exactly like this. Zhanna Slor

Muse of the Day

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The north wind roaring down in October is cruel and cold and reminds you again — as the sea has a way of doing — that nature does not care for man. And somehow that makes the red and yellow leaves and the blue, deceptive noons all the sweeter and more precious because living is so dangerous and so short and can be so bitter. Elliott Merrick, Green Mountain Farm