Melancholy
Just stick it there on a page, watch it grow roots to swamp the paper and the book, the shelf and the room. Left to its own devices, it can eat you alive with a beautiful detachment.
Melancholy does not have a price-tag, nor does it come with a prescribed negativity. It’s rather misrepresented, like the Mort card of the Tarot, or the Devil – these are seen as the “blights”, the dark cards to draw, with their connotations of the beyond and the unknown. It’s the Tower you’ve got to watch out for. The Chaos card. Therein lies the real unknown, because it deals with changing situations and circumstances – the universe with its boot up your arse, kicking you out the window, falling to the ground. This can be a token of goodwill on Fate’s part, if you believe in that stuff – a caution to those procrastinators who believe all is well, in stasis. But that upheaval, the rending of roots, can be the loss of everything you stood (and stand still) for. The cutting of your rose garden.
Mine are only ever the blue.
Melancholy, as I experience it, comes with the heads of ripe wheat and old brass sunlight; the flecks in a jaded blue eye. It comes in the sweetly curved smile of birdsong, in the latest and earliest hours of day, when the air’s no longer a freshness of green – it’s the parched throat of a papyrus scroll.
Yellow grass crackles underfoot; baked clay is split right through, so it seems you might look into the heart of the world and find it darker than you supposed. An old, hot wind draws those birds onto the wire, whispering that it’s about time they lost those few pounds of flesh and made ready for the long haul flight.
No extra luggage, please, we’re going away.
But you can’t come with us. This is for your own good, for you to stay, while others leave.
There are the drifting, dancing fairy-puffs known as Rosebay Willowherb; the bristling green shells we knew as Bombyknockers. when we were kids. Here and gone, and it’s sparks on the wind now – a fractious thing, full of rain, soon to be snow.
Melancholy, your true name is Autumn, and I forgive you for coming around so soon. This year has been hard where the last was bland, and the one before exceptional. I craved change and oh, petty fool, I got it. There was no reprisal, I never got the chance to better explain myself to him. Still. That was then; this is now.
Somehow, I think the bird on the wire has more chance.
I relish this time of year, for its sweetness as bitter as almond paste. The glowing colours die in the heart of the morning, when mist is a silverspun wreath, framing your lashes and hair. Each silver droplet is a second on my clock. Soon there will be the breakdown, the conflict of seasons, as the air draws out its last strangled hot breath, to die in an icy whisper.
They pop in the heat like cereal in milk
–
When nothing else will do, there’s always Shakespeare
My favourite time.
celenagaia 
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