Ten o'clock sunlight just strikes the upper sycamores, strikes them up to creamy luster against a bluet sky. Every two minutes a single leaf is loosed, cider brown, to sway and tumble down, rocking slowly to the understory. In the silence one can even hear them as they settle, rustling, in.

Not silence; rather a cool stillness, not deep, but vast. A ceilingless, italic stillness encasing many October sounds. Chipmunks and red-bellies. A catbird mews in the coralberry. A late cicada. Wood ducks whining beyond the hook of the stream. But they are weightless, transparent sounds of little avail in the clenched stillness, that savory, sure signature of the long equinoctial arc and its inexorable celestial physics: distant, aloof, detached as a season on Mars.

All caught within the understated etymology—Fall—a word so lambent, so gravid with graphic gist it hangs with its charged soft-palate brevity like a perfect wind-thinned ideogram. The "faule of the leaf," as Elizabethans had it: empirically based, but carrying the grace note sense of diminuendo and balletic descent that gives these days their minor-key sweetness and inadvertent etymological pang.

Poison ivy vines cling yellow on the larger trees, and blackhaw leaves are reddening. A belated walnut drops from its limb to splatter through the leaves below and splash into the creek. White-throated sparrows lisp in the low brush and a wary thrush in a young buckeye looks, leaning.

As a morning it is handsome enough. Yet it cries out for something more‹for warblers. In autumn the warbler craving is even stronger than in May. The October eye hungers for a point of firm warm-blooded beauty to emblematize and wring focus from the wane.

And after thirty minutes of the stillness there is a flock at last, there suddenly high in a leafless walnut tree above the creek. Hurried and restless, they scatter in the treetop branches and begin to forage. They fidget and chase and plunge, drop to lower trees, swirl to the hornbeams near the footbridge where I stand: Black-throated Greens, Magnolias still bright and flashing, a Black-throated Blue, a single pale Cape May in the grapevine tangle.

Three minutes later they are gone. But they have performed what they were asked—to give brief pause in the declension, to both catch and break the fall.

As always, there is the Urge to Follow.