Among The Golden

It was fall. A ring of quiet surrounded the small town. The alders, oaks, the moments of trees alongside the
forest-minded road threading through that place had a square of purpose and agreement about them. What
was living was complete
as a home.

It was the nature of that place that it should have neighbors. Inside each this alias in movement,
a private life.
It was something none of them could ever get at. The impermeability of what they fed and refined, speculating,
thinking their way in and through each other, was where they came from. You could even say, respected.
What was left, then, was most of them. Watching these leaves rest.

East Heatherford. What they called it. In any given year of time, and said that way because across any stretch
of the unfelt are bound to be durations measured, beneath the most expressible excess, repeating the smallest
rhythm, exactly what it wasn't. Added to the phantom texture was the fact rarely prodded, there was no
honest town to be East of. Where West Heatherford began the rest of what was assumed to be
kept on going.

It was an expanse that had to be taken on credit. On good faith, as the church-bound had it. As summer
decayed from day into a shed diminished dimness, the retraction of heat from sunlight mellowed
the grasses, spelled gradual arthritis along the leaves. Everything green was drying out. And where was
the water leaving? South, like geese and ducks? Or was it the more literal North--up, where oxygen thinned
and nothing could keep rising? This they made reference to, often, laying their heads back, not so much to
look there as to allow it a better drifting down to where it might have a better chance of understanding.

And the old rubbed their habits together, and the middle aged accepted their lot from the air. The young,
still properties and power of their dream, did not notice. Compromises were clefts in the past of other people.
And that past, being one open piece, alluded to what was apart from them, easy to oppose. And in that way
eased involvement.

It could be October now. Dusk drawing twilight into November. The late workers are tracers in a trickle
through the Douglas firs of the long road. The one that brings them each to their home. It's cold. Chilly.
Some quality of temperature, ambiguity of empty heat, their disequilibrium with the outside though at
this calm of evening it's so inviting. On porches, in a walk beyond the drive, in sweaters that continue
to fit, but without remembering, they can feel shivers trigger the difference. Some have the idea, others
the word-parts, even others the mere reflection, the impression long exploded into a caricature that, upon
contact, is sure to die of the real person, occupying what would otherwise be passive space. The dog runs
headlong, through the dark. Ivy beyond the treeline hisses. A lawn jockey concentrates the quiet.

Though there is rarely any mention of it, no town archive to account for it, never is there a south to this place
than such moments. Are the clicks of utensils against plates within earshot? Has acoustical wideness, skittering
in hitches, landed at last, without recognition, as it is? A twig. Without a foot bearing the body's full weight,
without minding where it steps, nearby. At tables where they don't think of the fact they can't see each
other they are. Chewing past the duration that aligns them.