Everyone's choosing sides

There’s that hint of smoke in the air again, sharp-smelling as memory, a crackling autumn-woods feeling that gets my hackles shimmying like gasoline, like American flags in our Nixon childhoods, witch burning Halloweens, pitch- forks and torches bustling and chimeric in their own fugitive twilight. Seems the center’s feeling the squeeze lately: lines are drawn; in the trees rustling flame-colored around the square I can see how nature is drawn inevitably to extremes – not without a kind of sadness, for autumn’s fine as any middle thing; and I’d remain here longer if I could, with the tang of wet-leaf-burning coloring my dreams, and want only an inch left here to hang myself by my equivocating spine.