You Can Feel It

The sun is hot and then it's not.The wind blows and the sky suddenly gets scowly with clouds and leaves you didn’t know had fallen begin scuttling across the sidewalk.Temperatures swing from the high 50s to the mid- 90s in a single six-hour period.Something is happening. The crickets know it; your skin knows it, safe from a weakening sun.Even the crickets know it, who, at twilight, are buoyantly bowing away on their little fiddles but by 4am are dead quiet. Have they taken a fright at the nighttime cooling and are dummying up so as not to call attention to themselves?I don’t know.I understand almost nothing of the great changes afoot.Here is a poem by James Richardson called End of Summer. It makes an sharp ache in my throat today. See if it does that to you: 

Just an uncommon lull in the trafficso you hear some guy in an apron, sleeves rolled up,with his brusque sweep brusque sweep of the sidewalk,and the slap shut of a too thin rental van,and I told him no a gust has snatched from a conversationand brought to you, loud.It would be so different if any of these were missing is the feelingyou always have on the first day of autumn,no, the first day you think of autumn, when somehowthe sun singling out high windows,a waiter settling a billow of white clothwith glasses and silver, and the sparrowsshattering to nowheresomehow ARE the Summer waving that here is where it turnsand will no longer be walking with you, traveller,who now leave all of this behind, carrying only what it has made of you.