Autumnal

As the time changes leaves bail out of the Locust floating yellow on the water. Twilight enters quietly spun in skirts and stays of cotton-pale fog. Poised in the feminine stillness of many years past. she listens to the ghost dance of swallows haunting the barn. Their wings flapped under the weathervane steeple that evening when a farm boy's leg was stitched together by a midwife who knew little about sterile surgery. The woman plied her needle and twine in a concrete stall meant for cattle The rancher's daughter held a lantern, hoping he would not loose his limb -- days later when gangrene could nest near the bone and a fetus could bloom from a mass of seeds.

What would she do, unmaried girl, if these worries prospered? Her eyes glanced up. The birds would soon migrate to a garden of cactus vine and dry wind where Frida Kahlo painted, posessed a wild skill for unleashng pain or love -- no shame. If only she had known how. Then her head turned and she looked through a window. The lake rippled straining to clear the jaundiced leaves and make clean room for a drowning. Note -- Painting is by Itallian artist, Walter Girotto.