Luminous

She is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous
like golden leaves in this glowing season, lit from within.
She is like a brown dog nosing at the smell of earth
and sniffing at voices above the folded hillsides rising
like smoke and the moon echoing in cobbled walkways
and leather shoes and the smell of horses
and brown barns filled with sweetly sleeping swallows
that startle and rise like leaves cast by the wind.

And on these fall days her voice is strong and a little rough,
like newly sawn pine, and she will look right into your eyes
as if you were the landscape reflected in a silent lake,
as if you were the season turning in a single storm and she
the dawn slanting across the brown and broken fields
on a chill November morning. And she will stride through the
rows of rattling cornstalks gathering and spilling light because
she is not beautiful but in the fall she becomes luminous.