Sitting here in the tent on the last night of the trip - at the end of summer I came across this poem by John Engels in a book of his poems that I picked up in Atticus Coffee Tea and Books in Park City, Utah.

At Summers End -

Early August, and the young butter nut
is already dropping it’s leaves, the nuts
thud and ring on the tin roof,

The squirrels are everywhere.
Such richness! It means something to them
that this tree should seem so eager

to finish it’s business.
The voice softens, a word becomes air
the moment it is spoken. You finger the limp leaves.

Precisely to the degree that you have loved something:
a house, a woman, a bird, this tree, anything at all,
you are punished by time.

Like the tree,
I take myself by surprise.