The Summer is fading slowly and luxuriously. It is like the sliding knob on an old light fixture. Or the laboured cooling off of a cup of coffee over the course of a good breakfast. The air is changing. The colours are changing. It is mesmerizing.

I've been watching Summer simmer down for a couple weeks now. Scrub bushes are going red and then drifting into a desiccated brown. Spectacular sunsets set-up spectacularly hazy night skies. The Moon competes with fog and mist and the accoutrement of seasonal battle. I love it all desperately. I love all of the seasons, really, and I could never really be forced to choose one over the other. But it is now the end of Summer and the advent of Autumn, and therefore I will choose to love this time of year the most...for now.

And, like the seasons and their moves toward battle, I am moving tectonically toward being in love. Oh, the slow pace of physical geography! Is there no better way to move into such feelings? Is it not better to savor the world around you and translate it into how you express and interpret your feeling? I cannot imagine anything more proper. I hope she thinks along similar lines. I hope she imagines me moving along fault lines and volcanic chains. I hope she understands that my movements, while slow, are imperceptibly strong and decided. That there is change and flexibility, but also permanence?

Her hair smells like rain. Like Spring rain, to be exact. It is the scent I detect every April when the winds begin to change into breezes. When the first green buds and shoots contribute that initial burst of fresh oxygen into the breezes that pass gently over the gumwood sill over the desk I sit at. I smelled that in her hair. Just as I saw the placid waters of the Finger Lakes in her eyes. No seas or oceans in that blue...no. No, that blue is as the waters of giant freshwater lakes tucked into the folds between glacially mounded hills and surrounded by vineyards, fallow meadows, forest, and golden strawfield. Without any doubt. I see it in my stolen glances.

Shall I continue like some callous-handed Apollinaire? Shall I speak of her easy smile that hangs like a phantasmigoric Crescent Moon in the night-time sky of her cosmologically profound face? Is that awkward? Yes. Do I care? No. I am grasping happily at straws and waiting for cars, buses, trucks, bicyclists, pedestrians, baby carriages, demons, demigods, ancient warriors, Druids, kings, earls, re-incarnated Lamas, pashas working for the Levant Company, and the ugly traders plying the backwaters of the Hudson Bay. I am waiting for all of them to pass by me so that I will have more time with her alone and away from the things of man. Away from the encumbrances of modern life. Away from distraction.

Oh, sing. Write like Neruda and dance like Borges in his mind. Read them all in the original Spanish and feel the breathy heat in their words. I guarantee that if you read the Spanish original aloud, you will feel that heat. You will feel the dust of the Pampas collect in the back of your throat as you makes your way across Patagonia toward Tierra del Fuego. And back North. And sing. Again.