End of Summer

 

Steven Outram

 

 End of Summer

An agitation of the air, 

A perturbation of the light

Admonished me the unloved year

Would turn on its hinge that night.

 

I stood in the disenchanted field

Amid the stubble and the stones,

Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me

The song of my marrow-bones.

 

Blue poured into summer blue,

A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,

The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew

That part of my life was over.

 

Already the iron door of the north

Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows

Order their populations forth,

And a cruel wind blows.

 

Stanley Kunitz

That moment when, doing something usual and ordinary, you feel it - something is happening. Something is changing.

Is it a leaving, or an arriving?

The phrase " turn on its hinge", and later, " the iron door" - you can almost hear the creak of it, feel it's coldness, it's finality - like a prison door.

Is Summer a room in Time's house? Or is it outside, and now we move inside, into the dark confines of an inhospitable cell?

"I stood in the disenchanted field". All the lovely sea-like grasses, gone. All the movement and sway shorn down to bristles. And then the realization "that part of my life was over".

Is this the season of disenchantment? And what happens when only the bones are left?

 Is it possible that there is a deeper magic? A magic beyond seasons, a meaning running through all times and places, an unswervable undefeatable unchangeable and glorious victorious beauty that transforms us?

That would melt an iron door.