aspens

Aspens, in their finest vestments,

Rock about the flank of a hillside,

Made to sway by autumn winds,

Marchers in a dream procession.

Their robes of leaves,

Burnished by the sun, shimmer,

Summer's verdant dress

Turned to golden spade-shaped coins

(A fantastic currency),

Brighter even than the scales

Of a sun goddess's raiment.

Their quaking is not the trembling of the fearful,

But the quickened ecstasy of celebrants,

The silent, sly, those inducted into mysteries

We can never hope to witness.

The cadence to which they dance

Is the piping of the breeze,

Which ripples through the meadow

(Sweetly plangent waves in a sea of grass, breaching like a whisper on the tree-line),

Running its hands through ashen boughs;

It strums an instrument a mountain's breadth.

The music of the air streams like a mad crush of downdraft,

Through even the most cloistered minds of the unimaginative.

It impresses itself as more melodious

Than the jingling bells of a princess's anklets.