Poem for Sunday and Brookside Autumn

Did You See the Sky
By Rachel Jamison Webster

Did you see the sky through me
tonight, carbon blues and clouds like ropes
of wool behind a fringe of branches,
great combs of black stilling in their sap,
stiffening with winter. I like to imagine
love can pull your essence like red thread
through the cold needle of my life now
without you. I was just driving home
from the grocery store and looking up
over the roofs, I remembered once when
I was overthrowing my thoughts
for doubts you said, I know how to love you
because I hitchhiked, and it was never the same sky twice.
Now, I hear you say, this music is like wind
moving through itself to wind, intricate
as the chimes of light splintering into
everything while glowing more whole.
It is nothing like those dusty chords
on your radio, each an ego
of forced air, heavy with the smells
of onions, mushrooms, sage and rain.
Drink it in, you say, those corded clouds
and throaty vocals. You will miss all this
when you become the changing.

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"I wrote this poem in the months of grief after my partner died," Webster wrote for Poem-a-Day last week. "I often wondered if he could see or experience the world through me somehow, and what he would say from his new vantage point."

It rained most of Saturday. We kept saying we'd go walk at Great Falls or the Arboretum or someplace when it stopped, but it rained all through the Penn-Princeton game (which the Quakers won, whoo!) and the Maryland-Wisconsin game (which the Terps did not win, boo), and by then it was getting dark, so we just took a walk in the neighborhood. Hey, we got to see bunny and deer, which we probably wouldn't have seen at a park!

I was briefly really into Doctor Who because I really like Capaldi, but then they gave him such a massive explosion of mansplaining (fine, Gallifreysplaining, but it was to a roomful of women) that all my pleasure dissipated by the end of the episode. And I was briefly into The Last Kingdom, but they have Uhtred making the same stupid mistakes every week; it's hard to root for him. A few more fall Brookside Gardens pics: