Season of Yellow Leaves

by Laura Ross

Yellow, a brittle current,
bluster-bound and having had enough,
like you and me—
midair, but wingless,
skittering into crevices, patterns
of wind, gullies pooled and fermenting.
Between us,
the dust up,
the blow back,
the raking ache
of clearing out & settling into smoke.
Did you breathe it in? What was gold

already sifted from our histories,
shaken out in flakes that disguised
the road home.
Knee deep in drifts of it,

I wasn’t anticipating the onslaught.
Where were the satellites, barometers,
forecasters of surge and intensity?

The fall of falling,
one of us might have
penciled in the name for this season
on a weather graph or timeline
where even the light left early
and shared the color of letting go.