mono no aware -- the drooping autumnal vine holding more beauty than the summer bloom,

the fragility of fine-spun silk holding more beauty than robust leather,

the dissipating tail of your quaking voice holding more beauty than decisive chime.

your dissipating voice was the travesty i wilted with.

indigenous lore holds that hair incarnates a wilting prolongation of the nervous system,

dying antennae of a nervous sixth sense

wanding dying synapses, when you communed with my locks did you sense a voltage

dashing through veins, were you sentient enough to feel the split-second synapse

or had winter already numbed your appendages?

in celtic mythos, deer dash between this realm and the otherworld,

harbingers of sorts, just as the quivering mythos of your voice

marked the harbinger of loss and it inebriated me for an instant

like beams inebriate a deer in headlights, so unlike the darkness of its brooding abode.

but once i regained senses, i came upon -- through an unsuspecting grove --

resplendent branches of june in unsuspecting autumn air