WAITING FOR THE FULL MOON

Today the long brown road led to village shops and walnut cakes, yakimono galleries, mailing a package to mother- and father-in-law way up north in Shinshu (old name for Nagano), then on to other mountainsides, egg farm, forests, acorns, persimmons, gathering firestarter pinecones on the pine beach beside the big blue lake with little white sailboats beneath a big blue sky with little white clouds, a farmer in the distance walking slowly along the road behind his tiller, nodding at his neighbors as he goes, farm market vegetables, turnips, long white radishes, spinach, ginger, onions, gourds and the smiling faces that grew them, sliced funazushi laid out like pisces atop fresh rice, a new house behind the old fence up the road, straight the rows in the fallow fields, armfuls of kindling satisfactorily stacked by the door to the stove, crows calling in the autumn haze, sips of the taste of Merlot-- all wrapped in the slow cooling turning together into fall; tomorrow, logs to buck and split for next winter...