The greyed grass is mostly soft under my feet. A late October visit and I anticipated cold, packed sweaters and thick socks. Instead, today is 80 degrees and day 41 without rain. The leaves on the trees I cannot name are falling all around me. I expected them to be bright crimson and umber, glossy and supple. Instead, they are brittle things, the color of chestnuts and once-melted chocolate. They crumble when I brush the fallen ones from my hair. Walking the perimeter of the back yard, I watch chipmunks scamper, the bright red flash of a cardinal, the feathered edges of the lichen that patches the flattened back of the iron lounge chair. I think its lichen. It’s the word that comes to me. I like the softness of its beginning and end, surrounding the glottal middle. There are nests in these trees, messy clumps of twigs and dried leaves. Squirrels or birds. Were the leaves woven green, and then dried? What kind of nest could they cushion? Maybe the leaves fall into them in this dry wind. All afternoon I’ve circled wide away from the stillness of what I thought was a dead owl, tilted head, one wing stretched. I held my breath walking to stand under it and finally look. It is only a large branch fallen, precarious against another branch. The end I thought was a wing, ragged from a break that I can’t see mirrored in the visible branches. I continue looking up and the not-owl blocks the afternoon sun.
long shadows at dusk
birds clasp fragile branches
shaken by dry wind
—
Keiko Lane (she/her) is an Okinawan American poet, essayist, memoirist, and psychotherapist. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Feminist Porn Book, and Between Certain Death and a Possible Future, and is forthcoming in an anthology of Nikkei writing about legacies of incarceration. Her first book, Blood Loss: A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art was published by Duke University Press in 2024.
