Kate Flora: Sometimes to create a mood, sometimes looking for a theme for a character, and sometimes searching for the perfect epigraph for a chapter, I dive into one of the many books of poetry on my shelves. Often at the end of the exercise I will have four or five open books on the floor, along with my trust Rodale’s Synonym Finder. Today is such a day. The weather has been amazing, making it hard to stay inside and finish this darned book. There are bulbs to planted for spring, and there is something about fall that makes me want to cook stews and pot roast and bake a chicken and make apple desserts and a cake with Italian prune plums.

I wonder: Does fall do this to you as well?

When I’m setting a scene in fall and it actually isn’t fall, I have to dive into autumnal language to help create the mood. Even when the book does take place in fall, setting the scene can be a challenge. What words capture the tension between seeing summer end and impending winter? What words capture that tension for an officer having to give up his plans on a gorgeous fall day to attend to a crime scene?

My third Joe Burgess procedural, Redemption, begins on a day Burgess describes this way:

The warm and windy October day was so beautiful it hurt. The sky and the dancing sea were a deep, sapphire blue, the trees in the city rising up behind them in the full glory of a Maine fall. Fishing boats tied to the dock creaked and groaned and the rigging on berthed sailboats clanged. Farther out, the water was dotted with white canvas as sailors squeezed in one last day before their boats got hauled and shrink-wrapped.

  Despite the fishy smells permeating the old wharf, the air seemed nutritious and refreshing. It was a day made for hikes and picnics, for apple picking and seeking the perfect Halloween pumpkin. For breathing in the crisp fall air and being glad to be alive. For law enforcement, it would be a long, slow day for death.

 Do you have a favorite fall poem? What about a favorite recipe?

Here are some fall poems I’ve found:

  When You Are Old

William Butler Yeats

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Autumn

John Clare

 I love the fitfull gusts that shakes
The casement all the day
And from the mossy elm tree takes
The faded leaf away
Twirling it by the window-pane
With thousand others down the lane

I love to see the shaking twig
Dance till the shut of eve
The sparrow on the cottage rig
Whose chirp would make believe
That spring was just now flirting by
In summers lap with flowers to lie

I love to see the cottage smoke
Curl upwards through the naked trees
The pigeons nestled round the coat
On dull November days like these
The cock upon the dung-hill crowing
The mill sails on the heath a-going

The feather from the ravens breast
Falls on the stubble lea
The acorns near the old crows nest
Fall pattering down the tree
The grunting pigs that wait for all
Scramble and hurry where they fall

Autumn Fires

Robert Louis Stevenson

In the other gardens
And all up in the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!

Pleasant summer over,
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.

Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

We won’t be having fires to burn leaves this fall. Maine is in a state of severe drought. It’s a smell I will miss.