bounding down through the black flanks

September is finally here. And if that means fall, then I am of it. But it doesn’t really mean fall, not yet, unless it is just an incomplete phrase. Perhaps, fall will arrive urgently, fall is coming, fall is near. But it means what it means. If that means fall, then I am of it.

I saw a wormhole the other day, when I stopped from my run to watch my dog who was getting slapped around by a small turtle. Not the kind of Stephan Hawking wormhole. An actual one. I thought about how that worm must push its small body through that dirt, inch by inch, covered in the coolness of the soil, making small marks, laboring, cultivating with the tiny hairs covering the circles, layered like the years of trees. The pink flesh of it smelling for night to come, for the birds to sleep, for the cars to be locked out of the park ranger and the chains put in place. How it waited and waited in the night to cross that unsafe road, the one that had been dug out of the woods that are now protected by the government. And I didn’t see the worm, and the birds didn’t seem particularly full, nor were there little circles of flesh smashed onto the road as far as I could tell. So if it did go, under the cover of the dark sack of night, then it must have made it to the other side. When I started to run again, I wondered why it didn’t just dig a hole underneath the road so it could go back and forth at leisure, unconcerned with the danger, unbothered by car wheels or dog paws or running shoes. It’s true, I suppose. You really do have to walk through fire to stay in this world; otherwise, it would be hardly worth the crossing.