Autumn Rapture
Suzanne Morris
December 24, 2022
I.
It is late in the afternoon on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. As I drive home alone from the hospital, life seems as surreal as the autumnal landscape on view through the car windows. It feels as if I am inhabiting someone else’s body, that it was some other wife who stood by as they said to her husband, While we won’t know anything for sure until we get the final test results… Highway 69 climbs then plunges through a vast panorama of bright red and golden and orange treetops that everyone is talking about; never mind that this East Texas miracle can be attributed to scientific fact. Never mind the heaps of leaves already fallen; day after day after day the oaks and sweet gums and maples seem more and more inebriated with color. Today the skies are clearing after several days of unremitting rain, but my spirits are cast down among the wet leaves clinging to the ground. Again and again, I blink and then look again, spellbound by the vibrancy of color after the dull, monochromatic hospital walls.
II.
Now the blazing sun is quickly sinking, flickering between the trees off to the west, shining a single spotlight first on this tree then on that one, illuminating each as though it were a glittering, sequined soloist, and an old stagehand, grizzled and gray, hidden in the wings, was flipping those gigantic switches from my days of childhood dance recitals at the Houston Music Hall. Now and then, the sun cuts a wide swath across a pasture, casting a colossal ray that sets the entire landscape alight, the foliage glowing, trembling with incandescence. I blink and blink, trying to imprint this image on the walls of my mind, thinking about how I will describe to you what seems to me indescribable when I return to your bedside in the morning. And that is when I become eerily aware of a sense that I am being cradled and lifted high above. For mile after mile, the highway seems to be unspooling far below me while I remain aloft, eyes brimming, the treetops blurring into a landscape of flaming votive candles.
For forty years, Suzanne Morris was a novelist, with eight published works beginning with Galveston (Doubleday, 1976) and most recently Aftermath - a novel of the New London school tragedy, 1937 (SFASU Press, 2016). Often her poetry was attributed to characters in her fiction. Nowadays she devotes all her creative energies to writing poems. Her work is included in the anthologies, No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic (Kallisto GAIA Press, 2020), and the upcoming, Gone, but Not Forgotten, from Stone Poetry Journal. Her poems have also appeared in The New Verse News.
