The Air Is Almost Still

The air is almost still
and whispers of rain. Not a single cigarette butt on the
leaf-spangled tarmac tonight where I
walk in the near dark, happy at one with the air and with the
hill that falls to our brick-topped block wall, bringing
leaves and sometimes deer who consume our
impatiens. I want the gardener to spray them (the flowers, not
the deer) with maybe pepper sauce or something deer are
known to abhor. Meanwhile my breath is deepening, my
chest healing in the cool and there is a sense that this is
the same October I have dwelt in now for 86 autumns, the
same October that will always return and remind
someone of me, as it
reminds me of Skye and makes me thankful that the
wheelchair-bound clown who used to call everyone Ruth
has gone, whether to a hospital or to something closer to
home I do not know. I hope he has gone somewhere where he
will not be able to bother people with his ruthless trys at
joking, unknowing as he is of course of my Ruth but
keen to notice that his repetition of the name
bothered me. Still in this October cool, thinking of
my Ruth Skye, that joker seems no more
than another leaf, blown here by some wind
that now has blown again, taking him off
probably to visit Peter and Wendy; I think Tinkerbell
could carry him to seasonless
slumber far, far away, leaving us without
ribbons or wish for ribbons, palms open to catch the
cool October breeze.