September 12, 2012

Storms forecast . . . too dark yet to make out what the weather will be like.  Sometimes they're right, sometimes not, just like most of the world.  If you had to go by the air, I would say it's way too still for storms, silent and all in silhouette against chalk blue sky just brightening into existence.  Mid-week, the easy day for my students when all they have to do is work on their cards for Friday, easy for me too as I get to go around and see what they are doing with the theme of Fall: The Season!  Their choice, and perhaps a little surprising to me, when they had choices like dragons and eyes to choose from.  Perhaps it is because this is such an iconic time, back to school, harvest, Halloween, Thanksgiving, it gives them a lot of things to choose from.

So, a poem for this week's card theme . . .

Fall Song

Another year gone, leaving everywhere

its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,

the uneaten fruits crumbling damply

in the shadows, unmattering back

from the particular island

of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere

except underfoot, moldering

in that black subterranean castle

of unobservable mysteries - roots and sealed seeds

and the wanderings of water. This

I try to remember when time's measure

painfully chafes, for instance when autumn

flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing

to stay - how everything lives, shifting

from one bright vision to another, forever

in these momentary pastures.

 Mary Oliver

I love that poets make up words . . . unmattering . . .what a delicious word and you know exactly what it means, it smacks of going to be undone, of the rich decay from which life is made, of leaf mold and tunneling insects making the ground fertile.   This poem is full of luscious words, words that are long and full of sound and fury . . . moldering, unobservable, wandering, boisterous . . . and momentary.  Just like this morning . . . a momentary pleasure of sunrise and silence to start the day.  A poem for the season, even though summer may still hold sway, you can feel it's grip loosening, the sky fading, and the leaves beginning to lose their green, moving into the house of yellow and gold and the sometime bright red.  If there are storms in the future, this moment is beyond them, clear and growing more light.