Shoulder Season
D.T. Christensen
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2024 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Tom Howard, Poetry
Who are we to decide when traffic
to the orchard should peak? Or how to
name the first apple that falls and
smashes into seconds, into a thing
half-wrecked, swelling worthy of cider
or apple butter, the ritual my great
grandmother presented with her hands
until her hands became theory. Until
the cardinals outside her window cried
for more seed and thumbings through
Birds of North America while the slow
cooker mumbled. Now we have index
cards with instructions and chicken
scratch hung on asterisks, rhetorical notes
in margins like why did it take so long to
realize the seasons overlap like layers
of skin, one decaying into the next in
the spots you're not afraid to survey. Last
fall we raised a village in our woods and
named the trail leading in. It snowed
the next weekend and crushed homes
of moss, shed bark, twigs. That year we
camped in the Whites near a theme park
with a clock tower that read: Enjoy yourself,
it is later than you think. It was 2:30
and now we find the rubble of our own
doing in every season, the way discarded
leaves never go anywhere but instead
compress into strata and there's always an
acorn pinballing around the mower's
dull blade. When death next tapped
its glass we raced home from the beach
at dusk. It was summer but the trees
said different. Things were falling in the
air I couldn't make out or maybe
they were floating up from the ground
filaments bound to some pledge signed
long before peak foliage could ever be
forecasted. Some living parents of the young
know a secret: avoid the beach early in the
day. Relax, take your time, arrive when
the rest are leaving. Scavenge what the
morning left. On your way home, consider
what you'll admit to the one departing. The
one who calls you buddy. Watch for tail
lights gathering like wolves. If nothing
else, learn to trace the low sun as it wilts
toward equinox.
