Swallowed by Autumn

A creeper covered car | A surfacing cormorant | Caught between two worlds

I am deeply tired but still I walk. I hold my face in my hands first, cheeks pressing into palms, and then I drag myself from the car and up the broken steps to the towpath. The path is sticky with fallen leaves, some still yellow, some turned already to black, mulchy, squelching. The path is compacted dirt studded with rocks, ricks which press up, uncomfortable, unbalancing, through the soles of my boots. The water is opaque and I stop to tighten my laces beside a narrow boat called Olive. On the far bank, where a willow dips its leaves, there is a carpet of apple green weed. A coot glides through it, legs invisible in the murk.

I go down, past the weir, the bottom gate a foot open, the water gushing free. Overhead, wings stretched against the sky, still, steady, gliding. Neck long, thrust forward, I think it is a cormorant. But then I see another, another, ten, twelve, more. Not cormorants but geese, their black spreadeagle against the sun fooling me into believing I saw black feathers when all I saw was silhouettes.

There is a Land Rover that never moves, parked at the edge of the path, edged up against the trees. Now the Virginia creeper, flaring red and gold, has fallen around it, leaves brushing its back, its boot, its bonnet. It is as if it is about to be overtaken, the leaves dropping a closed curtain about it, the tendrils pushing in through a cracked window, snaking around the gear stick, the passenger seat, the steering wheel. This is the moment before it is swallowed, this man made thing gone feral. Perhaps when I come back, it will be gone.

I walk on, past the half covered car, to where the path opens to grass. The sun, rising, lower now than it has been, a sign of the shortening days, flares through the trees. The lake is a yellow blur, a glow. The trees stretch skyward, elegant lines through the light. Another creeper falls, impossibly red, and shadows stretch toward me over dew damp grass.

I go to the edge of the water. I go to the edge where the grass turns to mud and the leaves behind me rustle and I look out, over silver and yellow and blue. And then, sudden, a cormorant. A real one this time, not a goose in disguise. It pops up from under the surface, head small, feathers slick, and it glides away, breaking the perfect stillness. Resurfacing, coming back to this world, leaving the other one a secret.