Agraria_Journal_WINTER_2022

AGRARIA JOURNAL 2022 31 Audrey Hackett lives and works in Yellow Springs. A recipient of an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council for 2022, she holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Recent poems have appeared in Alba, ONE ART, Right Hand Pointing, Green Ink, and elsewhere. A Record of Autumn (after Charles Wright’s Zone Journals ) The moon arrives like a silver package, bundle of many colors or the color of ash. I remember Air Mail envelopes held up to the light, thin and blue as air traveled high and haloed over the globe. Here now are the silver notes under the great clicking of the golden maple, leaves so dry they scratch as across grooves of a record, a record of autumn, the lonely season, the sky spinning slow and soundless, the needle of winter waiting. Can we remember green. Landscape so green our eyes flooded with memories —the trees we climbed as children and as the children of the species, leafy instances of human branchings— each blade of grass pinstriped, ready for important convenings: will you lie with me and pretend to be our hands carving the air like flowers that limp…—no, limpidly make of themselves the shape of their outlines? Indelible as wind. Autumn is. A sketch of worlds. Out of the sky’s mouth come the bronze threads like the lines of a play forgotten before they’re uttered. Birds clean the air with their rake of smoke. The falling of a limb, a clean snap from the pared voice we can’t hear under everything we can. AUDREY HACKETT BACKGROUND PHOTO BY MAUREEN FELLINGER