It will soon return to summer-muggy, but the messy sycamore seems to know better, its leaves drying, beginning their rattle, signaling the ever-wary unaware why it’s time they moved toward melancholy. Then the clues couldn’t appear more obvious— crickets insistent at six a.m., a single crow caw-CAW-ing as if in rare sympathy with the dying year, a little-later early light glancing affably off the fine detritus that filters down like talc, collecting against the curbs. Our kitty-corner old man, neighborhood barometer, still walks his rounds, but the chores are changing and there’s less amble, more urgency, quicker how-are-you’s to passing walkers as he prunes, waters, mounds protective mulch around the tender stems of newly planted wintersweet. By ten, it’s fully August again, but the page has turned, and though the season ahead will be as always the most beautiful of this region—a color destination as some say (this year even more so after an early spring, then hard freeze, then drought, then days of cool, gentle rain that came too late to save a second try at any decent apple crop)— but the almanac’s predicted deep, white winter by mid-December, and that’s where we’re headed. That’s what connects the constellation of these vague feelings that have more to do with death than I gave credit—all the while arranging them for tonight’s slightly earlier darkening sky.  
D. R. James, retired from nearly 40 years of teaching college writing, literature, and peace studies, lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near Saugatuck, Michigan. Having come late to poetry at 50, in the past 20 years he has published ten collections, the latest being Mobius Trip (Dos Madres Press). https://www.amazon.com/author/drjamesauthorpage