On Parting

Andrew Wyeth

On Parting



It's over you know, the summer's over.
Clouds of dust as the last vehicle went out.


A jeep hauling a small boat on a trailer
Through the dust of the grey country road.


Patterns of tires, patterns of cast leaves
Printed in ashen dust


The next day clouds of snow, the crumbled sky
Falling and settling on the trees
Of the bare abandoned forest.


They have all returned to the city, while I remain
Sorting my summer notebooks:


Drawings of tender plants begun in the spring
Pressings of leaves


Which are prints of tough early autumn, before
The rot comes that thickens
The floor of the woods.


And what lies beneath the snow, the needle duff?
Cities of pebbles and crushed shells,


Kingdoms of beetles, republics of worms,
Forest of hyphae, tangled mycelium,


Roots of trees coming upon each other
In the dark.



Anne Zumigalski




"It's over, you know." Zumigalski is talking about summer - but these days I can't help but feel this poem's broader sense. Life has changed in such a way these last months that seems to mark a definitive "before" and "after", a change of season. What new weather will come, I don't know. I sit here, like the speaker in the poem, "sorting my summer notebooks", thinking over what I have heard and seen and experienced, wondering what it means, and how it will carry me through what is to come.


 

Falling Leaves and Early Snow

David Grossmann

Falling Leaves and Early Snow



 In the years to come they will say,
“They fell like the leaves
In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.”
November has come to the forest,
To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen.
The year fades with the white frost
On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows,
Where the deer tracks were black in the morning.
Ice forms in the shadows;
Disheveled maples hang over the water;
Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream.
Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold.
The yellow maple leaves eddy above them,
The glittering leaves of the cottonwood,
The olive, velvety alder leaves,
The scarlet dogwood leaves,
Most poignant of all.


In the afternoon thin blades of cloud
Move over the mountains;
The storm clouds follow them;
Fine rain falls without wind.
The forest is filled with wet resonant silence.
When the rain pauses the clouds
Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls.
In the evening the wind changes;
Snow falls in the sunset.
We stand in the snowy twilight
And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud.
Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight,
Glimmering with floating snow.
An owl cries in the sifting darkness.
The moon has a sheen like a glacier.



Kenneth Rexroth
from The Collected Shorter Poems



"The year fades with the white frost."
"Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream."
"Thin blades of cloud."
"We stand in the snowy twilight."

And then!
"An owl cries in the sifting darkness."


An owl cries in the sifting darkness? This is an accuracy of speech so exquisite I want to rave, make an idiot of myself, rant about poetry as an unparalleled instrument of clarity.
If snow is falling, it's like icing sugar being sifted. And it appears as if the darkness is being sifted. That's more than poetry, it's true. And what is falling? The snow or the darkness?

I love this poem. (I try not to say stupid things like that, but I'm stupid!) Every line is an image I know, that I recall from somewhere - an actual experience, a movie scene, a painting? Is there a collective soul? Is there a place where all beautiful memories and images converge? Where you and I remember the same moment, even though we have never met, and live half a world away? Is it possible? I need to think about this.

Honey At Table

Duane Keiser

Honey At the Table




It fills you with the soft

essence of vanished flowers, it becomes

a trickle soft as a hair that you follow

from the honey pot over the table




and out the door and over the ground,

and all the while it thickens,




grows deeper and wilder, edged

with pine boughs and wet boulders,

pawprints of bobcat and bear, until




deep in the forest you

shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark,




you float into and swallow the dripping combs,

bits of the tree, crushed bees — a taste

composed of everything lost, in which everything

lost is found.


Mary Oliver

 "The soft essence of vanished flowers...thickens...grows deeper and wilder..."This is a transformation poem - flowers turn into honey, which in turn draws us into the forest and makes us wild and bearlike - and honey, honey is the golden ingredient of wonder. A  trickle of hope that perhaps after all nothing is lost, but is gathered and treasured and returned to us in a honey of moments and joys, a taste of Eden – wild, sweet, Home.



(Here's another great poem about honey.)