Simple Sad Serious Things (Part 4)

The perfect November day
casts its shadows to birth and death.
It's the kind of day when on the wind
comes old age,
and you'll think about every ache in your body
and whether it's cancer
and you'll notice new asymmetries in your face
maybe swollen lymph nodes
maybe sinuses packed with mucus
(a glamorous kind of suffering).
I felt like an old man
because I had grown an itchy beard
and walked slowly to savour the crunch of fallen leaves
which, on that day, made squishy biological noises
like fetuses pushing through birth holes
or salamanders struggling for life
against their six-year-old masters.
But anyway
there was a point to this cadence
lost long ago.
On the walk I looked for it again
and wanted to find a song lyric to the repertoire
in my head, that faculty that serves up
an appropriate earworm. But nothing.
Nothing but communion like in Zarathustra's Prologue.
(You really should read it. It's only
14 pages long, and has all the choice Nietzsche lines,
the ones that make good fridge magnets.)
Anyway,
the trees were naked
and the trees were the mood
and my feeling was like the trees
that is, naked,
naked meaning vulnerable
because open to the world
and unconcealed,
disclosed, in other words,
which suggests confidence
in the sense of telling a secret
not in the sense of being a hero.
And that's what mute November trees are
but your mileage may vary.
All I can tell you is I needed that walk
because no more like it will come for months
because we'll go back to indoor navel-gazing
which I love
because it's preparation for death
if done right.

Consider: "Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty—-he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world-—alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty."