Tissue-thin pink petals of Japanese Flowering Cherry trees fall to the sleeves of passersby, clump in gutters, around the grates of sewers, or whisked away on the warm hoods of cars.

With no fixed identity, like winter's cold or summer's heat, monsters...are to be treated not ex-

clusively as the others of the defining group or self, but also as boundary phenomena, anomalous hybrids that constantly make and

unmake the boundaries separating interiority from exteriority, historical world from fictional otherworld, meaning autumn is winter's

first step. Unadorned, these trees look shabby as saints sown amongst beggars: what blossomed in their heart pales before the vagrancies of their god.

I know nothing of this.
Every time my steps
        meander
something unknowable
                     fades away.