Autumn Song

Unknown

Autumn Song

 

Autumn has emptied heaven of it's birds

And stretched a silence on the loud sea.

Gone is the last leaf and the last flower,

And all the gauds of summer are undone.

 

          Winter cuts off our feet. But we must dance

          In Spring's conspiracy of circumstance:

          Swallows sickling air's invisible grass

          Sketch hieroglyphs that translate at a glance

          To greenest meaning.

                                               The sun, love's looking glass,

           Summer, that stokes the furnace of the bee,

           Honey all nature in one grand romance --

           The ambience of consanguinity

           Hurls its huge myth around the world at me.

 

But now the sports and sunny shows are done.

A deadflower clock ticks out a year of seed.

The season's losses hide the summer road,

And crows talk hoarsely in the frozen wood.

 

Thomas McGrath 

 

"The season's losses hide the summer road..."

That strikes me. 

If I'm reading right, Summer is the enduring season. Summer the constant.

Maybe I'm not reading right, but if I am - 

there's pause for thought.

Our losses only briefly fill our view. Leaves are light, they blow away.

Are losses impermanent like leaves?

 

 

  

 

Rain In the Hills

       

Rich Bowman

Rain In the Hills

The dead stay with you always
taking house-room, finding in you
their haven and harbour, and this happens
even though you know their going sealed off
for you a segment of the whole circle
of things and now wherever you walk there is
some part of the hills and sky
you do not see, though it is not
obscured by the seasons or weather:

but where you are, in this impaired place,
they also remain and are necessary
and beautiful as the thundery light
over the black spurs on an evening
of spring rain; and being there
they will change, not as images
of yourself but in their own way,
allowing you to perceive them

Even the terrible deaths you believed
would shrink your heart forever
do not come to an end or leave you,
for you cannot repudiate your suffering
- it is in you, it is what you have become:
the limited world of loss is still
your support, your delight, and as real
as this hill angled with black stone
and the violet clouds above it -

they are yours, stately and strange
as they are, holding your defeat
and your knowledge of defeat, which is also
entirely at home in you, in how you
watch and speak, in your composition,
your nerve pathways, your membranes
and cells. This is the chemistry of pain.

Lauris Edmond

 

I can attest to the truth of this poem. 

Is it possible that death adds subtraction to us, that loss or absence takes on shape and mass in us?

 

 I don't understand it, but there it is.

Zinc Lid

Unknown

Zinc Lid

It’s the gray of canning season rain,

neither cool nor warm, and mottled

with feeble light. There’s a moony

milk-glass insert ringed by rubber

and a dent where somebody rapped it

to break the seal. But its cucumber

summers, dill and brine, are over.

No more green Mason jars cooling,

no generations of dust beneath

the cellar stairs, the ancient quarts

of tomatoes like balls of wax,

the pickles slowly going gray

as kidneys, pale applesauce settling

out of its syrup. Today, on a bench

in a dark garage it’s upside down,

a miniature galvanized tub adrift

on time, and in it two survivors,

a bolt that once held everything

together, season in and season out,

and a wing nut resting its wings.

Ted Kooser 

 

 

"...Two survivors."

 

The contrast between the purpose - that of storing abundance for future food, and the grayness, the reduced and dusty "survivors" of that hopeful outlook, grips me with its grimness. 

 

This has been a theme in my life, that of standing in the ruins of a once-established dream - a house or a garden or a person - and being asked to work with the things that remain.

 

 

And the things that remain?

 

 

In Kooser's poem, I see hope.

Two survivors.

Not much, but having lived and re-lived this particular, I understand that this is all that's needed.

 

 

"Season in and season out..." 

There is something (or someOne) who holds everything together.

And because of Him the future is stored with abundance and fullness and life.  

 

 

I rest in the shadow of His wings.