'Autumn's Only an Angel', by Alex Ward

I’m walking high, high up, see me, a black speck
in the sky, a mote in the eye of a cloud.
Don’t worry, I never fall, Death Himself
bears me up, puts me, princeling, in the throne of the
clouds.

From up here American cities, like strewn, glinting rubble,
mar the checker work countryside, the innocent fields where
grasshoppers whirr through the wheat.

I have no balance, how is it I don’t fall,
light swirls around me, carrying me over oceans as quickly
as small streams, I step across in a wink, in a glint,
come with me, mayfly, dragonfly, creature of my dreams,
treacle, eiderdown, come run with me through the clouds,
chasing, changeling, our hearts rise and fall, acrobatic
as summer swallows. Long autumn day of your
thighs down which I swoon, black chanting like
red deepening autumn in the bullish throat of cicadas,
thyrsus, thrill, wild threshing of the wheatsheaves; a long dusk,
elongated unto the midnight of your eyes.

The nighthawk sings for us, that bird of corrosion and dust,
but don’t be afraid, autumn’s only an angel that brings the
darkworld of winter blooming white as infamous
asphodels.

Alex Rainey Marcus Aurelius Ward lives and works in Batumi, Autonomous Republic of Adjara. He's an itinerant, vagrant, hobo, bum angel.