Harvest Season

November, driving south of town to a dinner party.
 Among sloping verdant hills in vespertine light
 punctuated by single crooked trees.
 Here and there a moss-ridden barn
 roofs a tractor picking itself to pieces
 since the Roosevelt administration.

I'm boring lately, I know.
 Describing the trees and the weather and tractors.
 But the starting is difficult, What is there
 beyond the sweeping clean the door-frame
 of the mind anymore?

The other day on my walk,
  beneath a sky filled by clouds heavy with rain
  between leaf-splatter beneath the trees,
  bursts of red and yellow like
  nature's best impression of a Pollock,

Two black-and-white cats lounged atop the broken Chevy
 gazing at me. In a word:
 witheringly.
 Totally certain that Yes, Man-Person,
 You Are The least Important Or Interesting Thing We Have Seen This Day.

Two houses down,
 still no clues concerning the
 out-sized rusting orb on the unkempt lawn,
 a kohlrabi starship the size of a boulder.

It's gone now.

I wanted to mine it for some kind of insight on the
 post-soviet post-west post-post-east
 post-everything life we're leading.
 Imbue it with something of the ineffable
 stuffed inside of that spaceship hidden in the
 garage of my ex-Kremlin neighbor,
 brought out only in times of dire uncleanliness.

...Or:

Maybe it was just a stupidly-designed septic tank
 caked not with timeless truth but with shit,
 like every septic tank.
 Maybe it was just a strange image
 that got etched into my head
 to come screaming back out when I'm 85
 and even crazier,
 force-fed anti-psychotics 'cause
 I won't shut up about Sputnik. 

But those damn cats! My self-esteem was shot.
 Those damn cats made me feel the lowest
 I have felt in months. Positive that these walks
 will yield  a pitiful mental crop
 and the tractors up there will go to rust.

Such that even in preparation for this party
 I have plumbed and scraped and grasped
 at the bottom of the closet of my mind
 for the last possible witticisms I might
 have misplaced there months ago,
 In the hopes that in a matter of moments
 I shall appear to be
 a Vaguely Interesting Person
 one encounters at a dinner party
 and not the dull weirdo I so often fear
 I've become.