The Harvester was the rustling of autumn leaves, there one minute, gone the next.

The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.

Doubt: How can I know? Truth: How can you not?

And there, next to me, as the east wind blows in early fall, a season open to great migrations, are those lives, threading the air and waters of the sea, that come out of an incomparable darkness, which is also my own.

Do you want a good advice on your path? Here it is: Don__ be sure of your path! Don__ ever be sure of it! Do you want more advice? Here it is: Doubt your path! And examine the other paths, know the other paths!

Fall makes me think that if I fail horribly at this art thing, and then fail horribly with this writing thing, I'll go run a pumpkin patch.