August 22, 2012

Something has changed, the sky has that autumn look, and I know it's early, but there it is.  The sun has moved around so now it lights up the trunk of the crepe myrtle earlier and earlier, the smooth gold wood of it beautiful as woman's silky complexion.  The stripes of sun come in a different place, slanting across the sparse grass.  A slick black cat slinks around the maple tree, sunlight making its dense fur shine in ripples, this is a new cat, not the small black one that used to sleep under the shed.  This one looks wild, the way it walks full of the jungle and nothing of the indolent inside cat in its stride.  The blue jay sits among the leaves waiting until the cat disappears around Mikayla's car before it visits the water bowl.  A slender breeze picks at the late myrtle blooms, sprinkling them like the good housewife decorating a plain cake.  Somewhere near by a lawn mower growls moving restlessly back and forth, smoothing the green to accepted tidiness.

Sometimes you read a poem and the first time through you think it's about one thing, and when you read it again, you discover other things that you did not know in that first reading, being so full of what you thought it would be about.  There are all kinds of grief . . .

Day of Grief

I was forcing a wasp to the top of a window
where there was some sky and there were tiger lilies
outside just to love him or maybe only
simply a kiss for he was hurrying home
to fight a broom and I was trying to open
a door with one hand while the other was swinging
tomatoes, and you could even smell the corn
for corn travels by wind and there was the first
hint of cold and dark though it was nothing
compared to what would come, and someone should mark
the day, I think it was August 20th, and
that should be the day of grief for grief
begins then and the corn man starts to shiver
and crows too and dogs who hate the wind
though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn't alone, but be as it may,
since it was cold and dark I found myself singing
the brilliant love songs of my other religion.

Gerald Stern

I am wondering about the other religion, one of grief, and one of joy?  I don't like the cold and relish being able to go outside and have the heat sink into my bones and be thoroughly warm for a time.  It's being on the cusp, caught somewhere between, that causes grief, the waiting.  When the season has changed, you deal with it.  It's the unsettling time between that is both exciting and unnerving, that cold creeping in why fall has always been my favorite season, something like that black cat, full of wild, the wind changing, the leaves beginning the long journey to another kind of brilliance.  Far away, crows are calling to each other, and near at hand the woodpecker bangs his beak against the bark, the tattoo of sound loud and frantic.  There is that  other religion, that religion of not being alone in the change, of connection to the corn man, the crows, and in this case, the cat.  I know there is plenty of summer yet to come, but you can feel fall waiting across the green park, watching the door, leaching a little blue from the early morning.  Do we sing those brilliant love songs to comfort ourselves, to cope with change, to recognize we are not alone?   The tomatoes are still warm and ripening, cherries are abundant, summer has not stepped down, but you know it's slowing, you know the light has already begun its slow shift to another country.