The Ground Rises Up.

Today, my Seattle looks like a big apple. Spots of green where the leaves can't make up their minds when to fall, birds not yet pushed out of the nest by their mothers. Not yet. There are spots of red when a passing semitruck flashes by, whirling up a concoction of wet and crunchy, from the leaves fallen in gutters, from the bus stops. From the piles of orange and red resting by leaf blowers.
__________

And sometimes this apple has moist damp puddles full of bruises my feet avoid. Walking down the hill the boulevard north of the cemetary, I realize my boots aren't weatherproof as I feel slow infiltration seeping into wool socks, their gray fibers turning black with the wet dark water. The shoes I wear sinking into the mud around gravestones, around the base of an oak tree, into the muddy grass, gone brown.

For me, Seattle has turned a corner, made its decision. Today Seattle made up its mind, handing itself over to me over the counter at my local bakery, the jaded cold hands of my barista giving me chocolate brown crema in a cup, asking for cream.

My hands cramp with the cold and I know. The corpses in the ground rise up and smell it too--not because it's Halloween, but because their bones feel the warm chill of fire that comes in the sky, that stares back down at them when they look up at the leaves. Today, this city is alive.