A tall order, no leaves...in recognition, I give 'em a hat-tip...

This Autumn, Don't Think of an Elephant

I pose this season stripped of expectations
whose leafed-through signatories I'll defray
from listing as, why prove my deep suspicions
that, absent them, it Falls down straightaway?

That might be the first poem I ever heard. I needed no groundhog to tell me spring was coming, since I knew spring was around the corner when my father would recite this poem. We've discussed it online before, where I was surprised to learn that it is apparently well known throughout the Anglophone world. I'd always figured it was just a Brooklyn thing.

Autumn in San Diego

These tumbleweeds
are big as boulders.
Sisyphus,
I need your shoulders.

My arms are scratched
from clearing brush.
The fire inspector's
coming. Rush!

It's fall again.
The wind is hot.
Past years' ash dust
tints my snot

a baleful shade--
gunpowder black--
to warn me
wildfire season's back.

Julie, I think you have found a helpful vein. Not everyone lives where the leaves change and fall, but the seasonal changes have their own rhythm in those places.

Susan

Very good Julie. How refreshing to see boulders make a star turn in an autumn poem --and no avalanche! I feel nature itself could do more to combat poetic prefigurement. An embargo of seasonal change would upend all red wheelbarrows. But are the leaves themselves the cliche, or is it the obligatory demise they must endure? I'm thinking maybe the latter.

Here are some title suggestions...

Ode to a Recalcitrant Green or maybe A Paler Shade of Green

Such a typecast being red
Green's the shade of the undead...

not
 

Not an Ode to Fall

Potato chips with orange food-coloring
leave their crumbs inside a page fallen
from a tree that fell on copper verdigris.

In the dying light of auld lang sein,
love yearns for dry rot in its veins
leaving in its stead a chance to rest.

The paint chips left by sore
attention fell through the cracks
in the dirt under the linoleum floor.

They would have melted into ice
if it were summer in the arctic
with icicles too dull for threshing.

But now they fill the holes in
conversations on drooping porches
looking toward the drowsing barn.

The cows agree with holy orders
of concupiscence allowed by hay
in the box where they chew the fat.

Theirs was a camaraderie so overly
picturesque even Constable would have
painted it though not an outdoor sport.

The swains and wagonners were out
looking for love among the trees
and puddles and bedraggled sheep.

Back in the barn, smiling pumpkins
provided every sort of consolation
for any absent keys in the natural music.

A potential symphony of gobblers,
for instance, sat silently beside
the shining plates on kitchen tables.

There’s nothing like gobble-de-gook
to dispel the drone that tempera
removes with too much orange.

A death’s head on a post, however,
will do for orange what an ode on
autumn will do for mince. Praise him.

Seasonal Lament
 

I prayed the dog-star, Summer’s rage, might wane
Scorched by sun’s beams and blanketed with sweat
I got my wish; I’m drowning deep in rain
The suns’ too frail, my walks too swampy wet
I miss that over ripe and rotting shine
Autumn yields heat to miss and cold to moan
According to lament my season’s known
First flaming sun’s excess, now it's decline.

Erik

Looks
 

I know the Season by your looks
In Summer sprightly airs, in Fall
You never wink at me at all--
Head buried in a bunch of books.

Julie,

Enjoyable, but with a serious overtone. My ex-wife lived in San Diego in the 1980s. She saw the fire in (or near) Normal Heights , maybe it was 1985? It was a terrifying experience for her.

Julie, your autumn anthem is also suitable for Los Angeles!