As noted many times before, autumn is my favorite time of year. yes it often feels a bit melancholy, but that can be sweet, too. After this morning's live-streaming, I spent a while cutting back the bracken in the wetlands. There is much more to do but my old back could only take so much. And when I looked up from my labors, I saw my old friend had continued to ripen. After a long nap, Di and I sat out on the deck for a late tea with oat bannocks and soaked up the beauty. W.S. Merwin expressed his encounters with the light of September like this:
When you are already here
you appear to be only
a name that tells of you
whether you are present or not.
and for now it seems as though
you are still summer
still the high familiar
endless summer
yet with a glint
of bronze in the chill mornings
and the late yellow petals
of the mullien fluttering
on the stalks that lean
over their broken
shadows across the cracked ground
but they all know
that you have come
the seed heads of the sage
the whispering birds
with nowhere to hide you
to keep you for later
you
who fly with them
you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night
perfect in the dew
Two days ago, when I first noticed what may be a sugar maple, she was just starting to respond to the frost.
Today, her beauty looks like this.
And there is more grandeur to come. A poem by Mark Doty gets it right tonight.
of the pharmacy,
the first-grade class
has drawn these pictures,
each self-portrait taped
to the window-glass,
faces wide to the street,
round and available,
with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian,
whose attenuated name
fills a quarter of the frame,
stretched beside impossible
legs descending from the ball
of his torso, two long arms
springing from that same
central sphere. He breathes here,
on his page. It isn’t craft
that makes this figure come alive;
Brian draws just balls and lines,
in wobbly crayon strokes.
Why do some marks
seem to thrill with life,
possess a portion
of the nervous energy
in their maker’s hand?
That big curve of a smile
reaches nearly to the rim
of his face; he holds
a towering ice cream,
brown spheres teetering
on their cone,
a soda fountain gift
half the length of him
—as if it were the flag
of his own country held high
by the unadorned black line
of his arm. Such naked support
for so much delight! Artless boy,
he’s found a system of beauty:
he shows us pleasure
and what pleasure resists.
The ice cream is delicious.
He’s frail beside his relentless standard.
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