Song for Autumn

Mark Berens

Song for Autumn

In the deep fall

don’t you imagine the leaves think how

comfortable it will be to touch

the earth instead of the

nothingness of air and the endless

freshets of wind? And don’t you think

the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,

warm caves, begin to think

of the birds that will come — six, a dozen — to sleep

inside their bodies? And don’t you hear

the goldenrod whispering goodbye,

the everlasting being crowned with the first

tuffets of snow? The pond

vanishes, and the white field over which

the fox runs so quickly brings out

its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its

bellows. And at evening especially,

the piled firewood shifts a little,

longing to be on its way.

Mary Oliver 


Yes, let's try to imagine what a leaf thinks.(!) It takes a certain kind of individual to anthropomorphize at this level. Scientists seem to find it repugnant, innacurate, childish. But to unscientific me, it shows someone who feels they are in a relationship with the world around them. A person who feels this is trusting that life is meaningful.  And so should we. How does it feel to be a tree? Or the skeleton of a wildflower? And why does it matter? Because everything matters, every single thing. And so we live thoughtfully, thoroughly, deliberately, not taking our place in the world for granted, because everything we do has meaning too.


 

Now

Eric de Vree

Now

The longed-for summer goes;

Dwindles away

To its last rose,

Its narrowest day.

No heaven-sweet air but must die;

Softlier float,

Breathe lingeringly

Its final note.

Oh, what dull truths to tell!

Now is the all-sufficing all

Wherein to love the lovely well,

Whate'er befall.

Walter de la Mare

For my son, who taught me this truth - Now is the time to love. To love in the imperfect now is an honour, for love is an immortal and all-surpassing art. Poems, paintings, songs, all these fade away - love cannot die.

 

Parting

Theodor Kittelsen

Parting 

 

Parting, I take with me completed June,
My treasury of time, hoarded intact;
Eventual winds will not dissolve a tune
Of solid air, the body of this fact.
Mind's acres are forever green: Oh, I
Shall keep perpetual summer here; I shall
Refuse to let one startled swallow die,
Or, from the copper beeches, one leaf fall. 

Here, vagrant from confusion, I shall greet
My youth immaculate in memory's urn;
This is my country, where the tireless feet
Of my adventure, homing, will return.
Each day will end in this day; every ship
Will bring me back, bright lip on lonely lip. 

Stanley Kunitz 

I was hoping I could get another "Green" poem in - and here it is! It was a wonderful summer, and I don't want to let it go, so I love how Kunitz talks about storing time up in a treasury. "Mind's acres are forever green...I shall keep perpetual summer here..." Yes, I can do that, I can keep it with me, in my mind. Or, in turn, I can go there, to "my country", "every ship will bring me back." I also am struck by that word "homing". I've never seen it used quite this way. Is that it - is it that we are all "homing" - looking for that green place and time we once were (or that we never have been but have always longed for), that essential place of life and growth and balance - that Eden Country we all belong to? How wonderful.

Stanley Kunitz writes exceptionally well about these in-between moments, looking back while committing to go on. I posted his poem "The Layers" on January 16, 2017, worth a re-read, if you ask me.





 

The Haymakers

Myles Birket Foster

Haymaking

After night’s thunder far away had rolled

The fiery day had a kernel sweet of cold,

And in the perfect blue the clouds uncurled,

Like the first gods before they made the world

And misery, swimming the stormless sea

In beauty and in divine gaiety.

The smooth white empty road was lightly strewn

With leaves—the holly’s Autumn falls in June—

And fir cones standing stiff up in the heat.

The mill-foot water tumbled white and lit

With tossing crystals, happier than any crowd

Of children pouring out of school aloud.

And in the little thickets where a sleeper

For ever might lie lost, the nettle-creeper

And garden warbler sang unceasingly;

While over them shrill shrieked in his fierce glee

The swift with wings and tail as sharp and narrow

As if the bow had flown off with the arrow.

Only the scent of woodbine and hay new-mown

Travelled the road. In the field sloping down,

Park-like, to where its willows showed the brook,

Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook

Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood

Without its team, it seemed it never would

Move from the shadow of that single yew.

The team, as still, until their task was due,

Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade

That three squat oaks mid-field together made

Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut,

And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but

Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean.

The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin,

But still. And all were silent. All was old,

This morning time, with a great age untold,

Older than Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Crome,

Than, at the field’s far edge, the farmer’s home,

A white house crouched at the foot of a great tree.

Under the heavens that know not what years be

The men, the beasts, the trees, the implements

Uttered even what they will in times far hence—

All of us gone out of the reach of change—

Immortal in a picture of an old grange.

Edward Thomas

 I love the little details: the clouds, the empty road, the water going over the mill-wheel, the birds, the scent of hay. And that moment of stillness. "The men lean on their rakes." That moment where the details become bigger than themselves. "All of us gone out of the reach of change..." Interesting. Here is the moment where time melts into eternity, and we find ourselves "under the heavens that know not what years be."



 

Losers

Mike Worrall," Forest Terminal"

Losers

If I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.

If I pass the burial spot of Nero
I shall say to the wind, 'Well, well!'-
I who have fiddled in a world on fire,
I who have done so many stunts not worth doing.

I am looking for the grave of Sinbad too.
I want to shake his ghost-hand and say,
'Neither of us died very early, did we?'

And the last sleeping-place of Nebuchadnezzar-
When I arrive there I shall tell the wind:
'You ate grass; I have eaten crow-
Who is better off now or next year?'

Jack Cade, John Brown, Jesse James,
There too I could sit down and stop for awhile.
I think I could tell their headstones:
'God, let me remember all good losers.'

I could ask people to throw ashes on their heads
In the name of that sergeant at Belleau Woods,
Walking into the drumfires, calling his men,
'Come on, you ... Do you want to live forever?' 

Carl Sandburg

Defeat, failure, foolishness - but bravado nonetheless? What is it that I love so much about it? I think it's the power of negative thinking. I mean, to identify with losers is a convincing realism. Being down gives perspective. We have all lost, we have all failed, we have all acted the fool. Coming to grips with that can give us compassion. - I think that's what I appreciate about this poem, it's about compassion and finding the grit to go on. Even if all the options look like they'll end in failure. The reference to Sergeant Major Daniel Joseph Daly and the battle at Belleau Woods especially gets to me. That call to a losing battle - I've heard it before, and I don't know if I can bear losing again, but this poem helps. I'm in this fight whether I like it or not. If living means losing, let's do it. Let's lose big.

Five A.M. In the Pinewoods

David Grossmann, "Among the Fallen Leaves"

Five A.M. in the Pinewoods

I’d seen

their hoofprints in the deep

needles and knew

they ended the long night

under the pines, walking

like two mute

and beautiful women toward

the deeper woods, so I

got up in the dark and

went there. They came

slowly down the hill

and looked at me sitting under

the blue trees, shyly

they stepped

closer and stared

from under their thick lashes and even

nibbled some damp

tassels of weeds. This

is not a poem about a dream,

though it could be.

This is a poem about the world

that is ours, or could be.

Finally

one of them—I swear it!—

would have come to my arms.

But the other

stamped sharp hoof in the

pine needles like

the tap of sanity,

and they went off together through

the trees. When I woke

I was alone,

I was thinking:

so this is how you swim inward,

so this is how you flow outward,

so this is how you pray.

Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver uses such a light touch in her nature poems.*The way she describes here how she watches the deer, waits for them, still and silent as they come toward her, seems to me to be a description also of how she writes a poem. She doesn't push her ideas forward, she waits for the thoughts and ideas to come of their own volition. You might wonder, is that unusual? Probably not. But each poet has their own way of working (sometimes each poem has its own way too, I suppose), and it matters. Some know exactly what they want to say, and go about getting it down. Some make lists, and describe, as if getting the thing or idea or place down piece by piece. And some let the words come, not knowing what they will say. It makes a difference, how a poem happens. That last stanza  - I keep reading it over and over. I wonder if she's saying Oh, so this poem is a prayer. As if, at the end of writing these lines she now sees what the poem meant itself to be.

  
*see also "Snowy Night" posted Feb.4, 2017 

A Short History of the Apple

Ger Stallenberg

A Short History of the Apple

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.
Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.
Eve’s knees ground in the dirt
of paradise. Newton watching
gravity happen. The history
of apples in each starry core,
every papery chamber’s bright
bitter seed. Woody stem
an infant tree. William Tell
and his lucky arrow. Orchards
of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.
Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.
Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.
Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.
The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.
Snow White with poison on her lips.
The buried blades of Halloween.
Budding and grafting. John Chapman
in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward
Expansion. Apple pie. American
as. Hard cider. Winter banana.
Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet
by hives of Britain’s honeybees:
white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

Dorianne Laux 

A list. Just so you know, lists can be beautiful, can be poems.