Regulating

We're not quite there yet.
Green hasn't completely given over to amber,
red and eventually brown,
but it doesn't stop a camera roll
of pictures taken on my walk to work.
Insanely scarlet five-point leaves,
huddles of burgeoning yellow berries,
a clutch of branches against a September sky.
If it wasn't such a clear day I'd call it misty,
but it's the cloud of vape-smoke
expelled
from a passing commuter.
Something like black cherry,
a trace of dust left on my clothes,
unseen fragments in the air.
I still salute at crows,
a childhood superstition,
and pass the Highway Maintenance guys
planting lurid geraniums in concentric cirles on the cliffs.
The tide's roaming in,
a slick grey blanket,
softening the view.
I take more photos, obsessive almost: the sky again, a tree, the sea,
gobbling it up,
in case for some reason I can't commit it to memory.
The trees are simply regulating:
a chemical process to adapt to seasons;
it's nothing special to them.
But somehow as they go about their business, this
change of seasons fills my heart right up, like
battery power.