Counting Absences

Counting absences

Days without red-winged blackbirds:

Autumn Samadhi

Bill Felker

The inventory of middle autumn is rich in foliage and color, but the approach of late autumn draws down the density and texture of the canopy and strips away almost all the floral barriers to winter. As spring overcomes February and March with an accumulation of new growth, fall spreads across the summer with an accumulation of loss.

One enumeration of late fall is the counting of what no longer holds, a counting of emptiness, cued only by memory and the more durable, woody scaffolding that binds the seasons:

Foliage of apple trees and crab apple trees, ginkgoes, sugar maples, trees of heaven, redbuds, black walnuts, catalpas, box elders, locusts, elms, birches, poplars, cottonwoods, peach trees, cherry trees, Osage, red oaks, white oaks, chinquapin oaks sycamores, red mulberries, sweet gums, silver maples, Japanese maples, white mulberry trees, beeches, magnolias, mock orange and silver olive shrubs, honeysuckles, Korean lilacs, quinces, privets, viburnums, burning bush, dogwoods, spireas, standard lilacs, gone or collapsing.

Silent mornings: no more robins chattering, no cardinal song, no dove song, no red-winged blackbird song, no grackle song, no cicada song, no katydid song, no cricket song.

Hollow milkweed pods, bare raspberry canes, bare blackberry canes, the leaves of hostas and stonecrop melted, innumerable flowers absent, and harvest complete – no wheat, soybeans, corn, tomatoes, peas, beans, cucumbers, zucchini, lettuce.

From a litany of creatures and events no longer present, one might unthink the world, take it down and let it rest. Emptiness is to space what silence is to sound. In the monastic embrace of the quiet, autumnal cell, I watch and listen, counting absences, replacing nothing.