Synchronicity, or Fall is Coming

I was sitting in a class last night, listening to my instructor talk about something or other, and all of a sudden I swear I could smell the dry breath of a campfire. It was merely a flash of sensation—memory or prophecy I can't tell¹—but for one moment I was in the crunchy leaves of autumn, among the rough bark of trees, out in the endless cool air of an echoing sky that shoots back the rumor of a barbeque not too far away, and then I had zipped back into the 3rd-floor student library room where our seminar was being held.

A few minutes later I turned my head and for a split second Halloween was upon me in all its glory: bats and cats and chunky-eyed pumpkins smiling the dim light orange, brown paper bags and waxed candy wrappers, tennis-shoed ghosts and library books smelling of clear plastic covers and rich thick paper.

Then I looked down at the table in front of me, and my eye lighted instantly the word "October," buried in the middle of a poem on a page, unread until that moment.<sup>2


1</sup>I suppose that in writing this I have irrevocably made it memory.
²This is how an essayist writes this. How would a poet do it?