November 10, 2012

Moving further into fall, and gold is beginning to dominate, gold light, gold leaves, even gold in the grasses, long by the road, heads heavy with purple-edged seed.  The sky still the faded fall blue but filling now with random clouds, the high thin kind that move restlessly overhead and make no kind of shape you can recognize, like wrinkled curtains bunched up on a blue table waiting to be ironed.  The light is restless too, blurred by the clouds at odd moments, shadows then brightness, then shadows again, swift and temporary.

It seems fall is the season for looking back, I am not quite sure why that should be so, but nostalgia seems to be a large portion of the season's appeal.  I rarely send poems about romantic love: first, it's hard to find something that has not been done so often before that you feel like you are reading one of those exercises they give you in school where everyone ends up writing whatever first comes to mind, and second, we all are so familiar with it from movies and books that it's hard to find something that evokes a genuine response.   Still, for today, here is a poem about love and its loss, about looking back . . .

Low Noon

Long after our last slow day together,

say, a campfire, a walk in the woods,

getting lost and not caring;

a year since the last rain-soaked note

under my wiper blade in the parking lot,

how she’d thought about my offer;

months after we both knew it was over,

since we last kissed or had a talk

long enough to be nuanced,

there comes a second kind of silence.

Drizzly and cold, say, at twelve o’clock,

could be today, November tenth.

The phone doesn’t ring, the postman

doesn’t bring the unexpected letter.

I forget to check the box.

The trees have dropped their leaves.

The noon sun barely tops the trees.

I’m not thinking of her either.

Jim Ralston

There is a second kind of silence, the one that comes after a certain amount of time, after a certain acceptance has settled in, and it's not just about love or the loss of it but any kind of loss.  There is that point where even the most acute pain is fading, where you don't think about it as much, or you're trying not to, or you just don't acknowledge it as often any more because you have to go on living, the days keep coming.  I like this quiet poem that takes fall, with all its strange light, with its letting go, with its shorter chilling days and turns it into something that recognizes our looking back, even if we don't want to, our not thinking of what is was left behind, though even not thinking of it, you remember.  And I have to admit, I like that it had the date of today in it, making it seem closer and more real somehow, though neither drizzly nor cold, it seems to be a day set on looking back, while denying any emptiness.