Another take on autumn, quite different than the previous one.
Don’t listen to what all those painters and poets tell you! Autumn is nothing but an ugly old man: he wears seven layers of ragged furs, his beard is like tree bark, the liver spots covering his face are like acorns.
His mouth smells like raven claws, and when he moves his whole body screeches like a thousand teeth grinding at once. His lungs rub one against the other like two sick people bickering.
There’s a pumpkin chained to his foot, and on his shoulder he has a huge moth, which flutters its wings every time the old man coughs. They sound so much like the cawing of crows, those fluttering wings, that they just might be one and the same thing.
The trees shudder as soon as they see the old man. They would run, but the deep black earth keeps them in its shackles. There’s nowhere to go once you’re in the ground. They try to defend themselves the best they can, they throw chestnuts at him, but as the days go by, like ash in the wind, you can see them growing more desperate: they scream red and yellow and brown, on a thousand voices and a thousand hues, up to the top of the hill.
Beneath the old man’s foot the flowers creak, the grass moulds, the mould rusts.
Just like that the old man walks, stinking of cold winds, he walks like he’s having some sort of time shift that he needs to finish. He reaches all the way up, to the green fir trees. Tired and listless, he scratches his cheek against the needle of a pine; and from his dried skin my tear drips silently, for who knows what forgotten memory.