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

Closing my eyes, I breathe in the air around me.When I slowly re-enter the world, I look into the most intense brown eyes I've ever seen. My breathing catches. I can__ look away. Fuck, he's hot. I can literally feel my brain cells frying. Who's dumb as a rock now, Alexis?I feel completely frozen and can__ move. I don__ even think I want to. Blink, Richards, blink."-AlexisWhat happens to someone who has everything figured out and doesn't let anyone rattle her?To some love is exciting. To her, it's a nuisance.

If there is one thing I can promise, that I can guarantee, it is not that I can protect my other allies from the same fate as Sage, it is not that I will not lose battles in the war, it is not that there will be times that will try my determination, it is this: I am the Pauraque__ rival. And I shall be the one to watch her fall.

Once upon a time, there was a man as great as the gods_But even the great can tremble with fear.Even the great can fall

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.

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.