Autumn is, perhaps, befitting
for heartache—everywhere you look,
loss. Loss of leaves, loss of color,
loss of warmth, loss of light.
If you are grieving,
the barren world seems to mirror
what’s happening inside you.
Everything seems to say,
See, you can’t hold on.
So how to explain this explosion
of beauty, this unexpected spring of grace—
how to explain the way generosity
pushes through what’s dead
like apple trees in first pink,
how gratitude flourishes, enormous
invisible blooms, and though
you can’t see them, everywhere,
everywhere in this heart of autumn,
you smell the insistent green of springtide,
the astonishing perfume of love.
Posts Tagged ‘autumn’
Out of Season
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, grief, loss, spring on November 3, 2021| 6 Comments »
Another Lesson from the Willows
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, quietude, rest, willows on November 8, 2020| 5 Comments »
The willows beside the river
are practicing how to let go—
they lose the bright red hue
of their skin and their leaves
turn brittle and brown.
It would be easy to think
they were dead if all I did
was pass them by. But
bend one willow, and it’s clear
how alive they still are,
flexible and sincere.
How little rest I allow myself.
I insist on my own evergreen.
How much could I learn
from November’s willows
that take a break from living?
I listen, as if the willows
might offer a teaching.
I listen until it dawns in me,
that the quiet
is the teaching.
Making Applesauce
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged apple, autumn, hope, preservation on October 25, 2020| Leave a Comment »
To buy three boxes of apples
is to believe the world
will go on long enough
that we should preserve
the goodness of autumn.
Perhaps it is practical
to cook the fruit,
to store it in jars,
but I prefer to think of it
as hope filling the house
with its sweet red perfume,
hope filling the shelves
with the memory
of sunshine, of bloom.
Mulching Leaves with Gerard
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, gerard manley hopkins, leaves, poetry on October 19, 2020| 1 Comment »
… by and by, nor spare a sigh, though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie, and yet you will weep, and know why
—Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall, To a Young Child”
The whole time I ran the lawnmower
through brown cottonwood leaves,
I recited Gerard Manley Hopkins
and waded in intricate cross tied rhymes
that defied the straight green paths
I was making. I hope Gerard doesn’t think it rude
I call him by his first name when I talk to him,
as I often do when walking alone.
He never speaks back, but I’d like to think
I’m better at listening for him.
As today when I repeated again his words
about worlds of wanwood leafmeal,
I swear he rose up
in the dry-honey scent of leaf dust
as if to say, this, this, this.
And while I pushed the red Toro
across the leaf-spangled lawn,
I thrilled to know the world as poem,
to know the ambush of tears as tiny wet poems
to know myself as a tired and ecstatic poem
while all around me the leaves continued to fall.
Student
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, communication, river, speaking, student on October 15, 2020| Leave a Comment »
The river in autumn
is clear enough
to see the trout
who swim
in the deeper pools.
There are many ways
to speak.
This is one.
When the Impulse Is to Grieve
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, cinquefoil, flower, grief, parenting, poem, poetry on November 9, 2019| 2 Comments »
Now dried and brown
the cinquefoil where once
bees danced in gold flowers—
recalibrating the heart
to find in brittle clusters
another invitation to dance.
One Unbaptized
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, baptism, communion, poem, poetry, pond on October 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »
filled with golden leaves,
the pond, and shimmering with sky
and me, too dry, too dry
Despite the Unleafing
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, fall, leaves, meter, poem, poetry, shakespeare, song on October 17, 2019| 4 Comments »
That time of year thou mayst in me behold …. Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
And though the leaves may fall and molder,
though the winter nights get colder,
and though, my love, we both grow older,
may the choir in me that sings for you
be ever clear and ever blue—
the stream beneath your red canoe.
And though it seems that time’s a thief
and leaf subsides to crumbled leaf
and though the days are gnawed by grief,
may I sing for you forever sweet
in tunes both tame and indiscreet—
sing bare, unruined, my heart, my beat.
Autumn Beside the River
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, poem, poetry, river, trees on September 6, 2019| 2 Comments »
The rocks that were underwater
two months ago are dry now,
and a woman can sit on them
beneath the bridge and escape
the September sun. But she can’t
escape herself. There was a time
she really believed she could control things.
Now she sits with her own brokenness
and invites the inevitable autumn into her,
the autumn that’s already come.
Invites the lengthening nights. Invites
the dank scent of the garden, moldering and dead.
Invites the loss of green. You can’t be
a sapling forever, she tells herself,
though another part of her argues,
Yes you can, yes you can.
The river has never been so clear—
every rock in the bed is visible now,
and perhaps clarity is one of autumn’s best gifts.
She imagines the leaves of her falling off—
how she loves them.
She imagines them golden in the wind.
To All the People I’ve Hurt Without Knowing It
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, friendship, giving, leaves, love, poem, poetry on November 5, 2018| 7 Comments »
I watched it happen, the confrontation.
The one who was hurt and the one
with no inkling that harm had been done,
and my heart ached for both of them—
for all of us really—all of us fragile, all of us
witless, all of us longing to love, to be loved
for being ourselves.
Outside the window, the leaves
were brilliantly dying, burning auburn,
vermillion, a heart swelling show
of what it is we’ve come here to do—
to give our all and give some more,
to do it unreservedly.
It’s all a series of repetition, design—
the leaves, the fall, the hurt, the blame,
the confusion, the reconciliation.
It’s all a matter of pattern and letting
go, letting go of whatever we think we know
about how to give.
What I’m trying to say is if I have hurt you,
I’m sorry. I don’t understand my own thorns.
I think I am singing and it comes out crooked.
I think I’m supporting and it comes out cage.
There are so many mistakes in my blood,
all of them believing they’re butterflies.
My friend tells me the leaves in fall
are returning to their true colors—
how the necessary chlorophyll disguises
what’s really inside.
What I’m trying to say is look at the leaves
outside the window, see how vibrant they are?
I am trying to love like that,
every day, the colors more true.
In Mid-September
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, parting, poem, poetry, summer on September 15, 2018| Leave a Comment »
Summer travels beyond itself and
warms the stones and gives
the flowers more of what they love.
it is like a lover who, though he
has told you he is leaving, returns
and kisses you until you are panting,
makes you believe he will always
hold you. But then, even as your lips part
and you lean in, he is gone again,
taking his warmth with him,
leaving your skin somehow more fragile
in the thin autumn air.
Katabatic
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, poem, poetry, transience, wind on October 9, 2016| 1 Comment »
The leaves debate the wind.
We all know who will win.
There is no sound in the fall.
Whatever we might do here
amounts to little more than their rustling,
perhaps not even that.
Scratch of the branch
at the window. And then
it is silent.
On Thin Brown Wings
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, giving, inspriation, poem, poetry, receiving on October 8, 2016| 1 Comment »
Perhaps not as many days of sun
as they might have wanted,
perhaps not as much warmth,
perhaps not as much rain—
rain that soaks in like a lover’s
lingering glance, and still
beside the trail in late fall
they are everywhere,
the seeds of next year’s flowers
giving their everything to the world.
On the Edge of Cold
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, offering, poem, poetry on September 27, 2016| 2 Comments »
They will say it is impossible,
but I want to give you things
they say no one can keep—
the scent on the trail
this morning, a golden smell,
and the amber light inside it.
Or the pause before the dance
commences. Or the moment
when falling becomes flying.
I want to give you elusive things—
the moon in the river, the way
the sunset turns the whole world
to rose, the feeling that love
not only is possible, it’s as
inevitable as blinking, as
unavoidable as noon.
It is not too late. In fact,
already we are here.
One Simultaneous
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, poem, poetry on September 25, 2016| Leave a Comment »
In a Low-Angled Light
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged aging, autumn, poem, poetry on September 23, 2016| 1 Comment »
Already shriveled, these marigolds
that line the fence. Something soothing
about the way the flowers keep their color,
though the leaves are brown and dried.
From a distance, they are vibrant.
From a distance, you might forget
that the garden will soon be filled with snow.
So much is ignored in the name of beauty.
Here, here is the season with your name on it,
your name the scent of gold. You find yourself
longing to be more like a lily, dropping everything,
not even pretending to survive the cold.
One
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, dissolving, oneness, poem, poetry on October 14, 2015| 3 Comments »
I’ve Heard It In the Chillest Land
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, frost, garden, hope, poem, poetry on September 22, 2015| 1 Comment »
Already the frost has come,
both intricate and merciless,
and it has taken the basil,
the green beans, the zinnias
and whatever hope we had
that summer might never end.
We knew our hope was irrational,
but that’s never stopped a hope before.
Every day there’s more evidence
against hope—the headlines,
the angry boy down the street,
the child bride in Afghanistan.
And still it rises up, slightly
browned, but still shining
like that marigold bloom that was hiding
beneath a sunflower leaf—
it should be frosted and dead, but
it’s not. Damn hope. Never
acting the way we think it will.
May it trick us forever into choosing
to live another day. And after a long winter
when we’re sure it’s gone, may it always
reseed, putting up dozens of starts.
Not all of them will make it. Some will.
Autumnal
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged autumn, blessing, losing the self, loss, poem, poetry on September 9, 2015| 1 Comment »
after William Stafford
When the leaves are about to yellow and fall
ask me then how I tried to hold on to what was green,
how I thought perhaps I was different,
how everything I thought I knew about gold
turned brittle and brown. Ask me what it was like
to fall then. Sometimes the world becomes invisible
and we know ourselves as the world. Sometimes
the only words that can find our lips are thank you,
though the gifts look nothing like anything
we ever thought we wanted.