Soccer season is over. The boys suffered a big loss last night, Paul cried, his girlfriend held his hand in the car, I drove into the dark. I thought of correcting the comma splices in that sentence, but semicolons are too heavy, periods too final. It is autumn, and perhaps autumn is the season of splices--fallen leaves underfoot, high school boys weeping, a World Series game sputtering on the radio, the eyes of cats glinting on the roadside. This is the season of Blakean sunsets, jagged clouds splashed with lemon, salmon, plum. Startled sparrows fly up from the grass as the cars pass, and threads of smoke rise from the chimneys of window-lit farmhouses, tidy ranch houses, collapsing trailers. A month from now, at the strike of a shovel, the earth will ring like a tamped bell--muffled, ironbound. Branches will crack and sigh in the cold. Today, the long grass glistens, it peeps through a blanket of gold, it shines in the rain, but the air is dark, I cannot see the grass, I only know it is there, I only imagine the shine. On a late autumn morning, morning comes late. Paul has gone back to bed, unable to face school today, exhausted by his tears. Oh, the small tragedies of our lives. They feel, as we live them, as large as the large ones.