This is the color of November. Mainly gray, with dabs of red and gold. The trees have just enough leaves to remind you they once had more. And so the season bends towards absence. A harvest, a feeling of fullness,… Read More ›
prose
Fall back
It’s the last Sunday in October, dry, and I’ve just torn up the front garden beds and transplanted everything to the back. Like Dawn used to say about our basement in West Seattle, the back of the yard is where… Read More ›
The dead
It’s that desperate time of year when most of the leaves are down and my morning walks are dark and windy. The time of year I took my last solo backpacking trip, last October. I’d quit drinking and the trip… Read More ›
Winter over
The walk was wet, the ground spongey. The leaves on the trees looking desperate, red or gold. He saw himself in those leaves and how they hung on. He sat on a dry rock beneath the trees on the lakeshore… Read More ›
They are still there
Why did I dream about you, after all this time? You were there in a sketch the way you once were. And the two of us were going home together, my place or yours. Yet we were older, there was… Read More ›
Carver
He lay on his back on the sofa like he always did, looking out the window. Birds flocked around the orange berries, limbs flopped over, leaning down. A hearty rain. The grass needing cut. With the pandemic they had gone… Read More ›
Last Saturday night in Wallingford
It is late afternoon on a Saturday in late September, early fall, and it all could be normal again if it weren’t for the masks and jugs of sanitizer in the entryway of the cat cafe here in Wallingford. The… Read More ›
Late summer serenade
In the morning I go outside to smell the ground because it rained in the night, the first time in months, and the rain is a novelty that won’t stay that way for long, as novelties do. And it has… Read More ›
Image of the full moon one August
There is no time like never. In fact, never is the absence of time, its imagined opposite. And so right now, this is a time that would never happen: I’m on the beach in the middle of the night in… Read More ›
On my way to the woodpile
The spider by the woodpile was the size of a magician’s hand and moved as quickly out of view. How wild it was when you went outside! Life or death! All the bushes and trees hanging on for dear life…. Read More ›
Bill Pearse 