October 10, 2012

For a day that started all wooly and gray and heavy, it's turned into sky high blue smeared with whipped cream clouds and a stiff breeze making some newly turned brown leaves fall down like another kind of rain.  The light is clear and fingering everything, turning over every leaf and polishing cars shiny so you have to squint, and the road almost white under the noon sun.  In the back yard piles of crepe myrtle leaves with the occasional clump of maple or saw-toothed oak have been raked from under the cane and the bushes and sit waiting to be stuffed into black plastic bags.  Some are not waiting but blowing back across the yard in stealthy streams, trying to catch the wind and move to someplace they won't be noticed.  In some parts of the country they have red or gold or orange leaves to pile up and look beautiful, there it's mostly brown with an occasional yellow and a very rare red, mostly from the tallow trees.  Tomorrow we will have summer back, high humidity and high around 90!  It seems our two days of fall have vanished, perhaps we will see fall again for a few more days.

The Love for October

A child looking at ruins grows younger
but cold
and wants to wake to a new name
I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring
walnut and may leaves the color
of shoulders at the end of summer
a month that has been to the mountain
and become light there
the long grass lies pointing uphill
even in death for a reason
that none of us knows
and the wren laughs in the early shade now
come again shining glance in your good time
naked air late morning
my love is for lightness
of touch foot feather
there is yet one more yellow leaf
and without turning I kiss the light
by an old well on the last of the month
gathering wild rose hips
in the sun

W. S. Merwin

It is the light that blesses October, truly a month that has been to the mountain and become light there.  Everyday the yard gets lighter and lighter, moving further and further into the season.  My love too is for this lightness, that now comes later and leaves earlier, but today it is making me notice how the clouds have turned into Pablo Neruda's white handkerchiefs of good-bye, moving off trailing fluttering ribbons as if from a garden party hat, broad brimmed and graceful.  My old rose bush used to make the most beautiful orange-gold rose hips from the few roses it made in the summer, a long spindly cane with six leaves and three bright fruits, reminding me of my honeymoon and the taste of rose-hip wine out of a brown bottle, distilled summer's sweetness and heat shared over a fire. 

Hope something light comes your way, sun, or a smile, or a cloud waving, or a leaf escaping . . .