We have again entered that time of no mosquitoes among a bounty of leaves yet harvested. The sky, and I don't know the science of it, but the sky is more blue, a robust blue, especially today without clouds, especially today against the golden trees of October. There is nothing pale about the sky, or in my mind, the day, a day warming with the hour, of sun in low arc across the southern heavens and all the neighbors busy at work, leaving me alone, in that wonderful stillness of wind carrying only the sound of itself. I'm eating home cooked, steel cut, Irish oatmeal. It feels of Fall on the tongue, and as I chew, I imagine cows and their pace and the peace I layer upon them in my imagination. The God's honest truth is, I don't want to trade this for work. I want to breathe poesy as I breath this day and wonder on what it all means and then I begin to think it means nothing of what is written, for what is written by critics, well, I can't imagine was meant in the act of creation. I'm speaking mainly of Keats's To Autumn. Perhaps he was conscious of each nut and bolt, of every turn of the wrist. But something I can't explain or define, something just over the edge of my ability to articulate, tells me otherwise, tells me that what he wrote to Reynolds,* of the sight of autumn upon the stubble, was simply the unlocking of a flow that did what flow does, which is to engage something beyond conscious thought, to travel some unexplored path, jotting sights and sounds in the natural progression as quickly as the hand could move. And I think, if we take him at his word, we don't try to work it out, for it was never worked in. So I'm going back outside to breathe and watch the leaves fall in ones and twos, just watch them twirl to join the others in the cool silence of a weekday morning. And if I am able, to enjoy the experience without any ideas about it.
*Keats described the feeling behind its composition in a letter to his friend Reynolds, 'Somehow a stubble plain looks warm - in the same way that some pictures look warm - this struck me so much in my sunday's[sic] walk that I composed upon it.'
4 comments:
.."The God's honest truth is, I don't want to trade this for work. I want to breathe poesy as I breath this day..."
dear Trée
the fall-blue sky ...steel-cut Irish oatmeal ... neighborhood rustlings like autumn leaves sweeping the summer-dried earth (were you born when we used to set the leaf-piles on fire by the kerb? smoke cigs made of dried leaves in rolled newspaper?!)... To have created a life without clocks and have-to's (of the conventional sort), the kind that's necessary to some, natural as breathing. Even without the trust-fund one can - must - do this, when first-food is a boundless now, to be with One who notices, sips, tastes, sits on a rock or gallops headlong into the open field when moved to. A freedom that's the envy of wondering neighbors, who may not be aware of another kind of work that comes with it, or arises from it.
Thanks for sharing your street-side autumn flow, its simple suchness, the tangents of timeless nature and depth ever present in your proesy.
This morning, opening Keat's "Selected.." anywhere, it opened to the middle of Canto 1 in The Fall of Hyperion: a Dream,
taking me as though I were sewn to Persephone's skirt as she went down. Followed by a rendez-vous that made me quite sure I will not become a Buddhist nun. And now back here, "to autumn" bringing sweetness to the noon-hour, in another day of many-fragranced breathings. I love your imagings of cows and their pace and peace ...
Constance, today was a near perfect Fall day, the kind of day you want to sit outside, and with poem and wine, allow the sun to bud and bloom your cheeks to rose and watch the leaves scamper like children across the still green grass, trees standing as parents and where dogs are still dogs.
The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.
The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.
A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily
moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.
Each minute the last minute.
Denise Levertov
Beautiful poem Jasmine. Thanks for sharing.
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