Over withered leaves

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T w e n t y - S e v e n   C l u b

Elmwood Cemetery

Charlotte, North Carolina

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In the cloud-grey mornings
I heard the herons flying;
And when I came into my garden,
My silken outer-garment
Trailed over withered leaves.
A dried leaf crumbles at a touch,
But I have seen many Autumns
With herons blowing like smoke
Across the sky.

> Amy Lowell <

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Happy Wednesday

First kinds of immense quiet

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R e d d i s h   F e t i s h

First Presbyterian Church Graveyard

Columbia, South Carolina

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This is a love poem. It has no business.
It happens in that anyway world
Where the bodies are by now decided
To get all the way up, accompanied
By changes in temperature and light
Welcome and unwelcome both,
Lie down, get up, go prone again,

Get nowhere in time. I won’t
Reduce to a single preposition
A relation to the one person about it
Like grass. Who has a pronoun, a name,
Three or four even, which globe,
Without containing, her experience,
Of which I chase awareness till

Her letters are with one exception
All over this deepening sheet, name-
blind blue of a cloudless day.
Unconcerned with property disputes,
The poem gradually permits itself
To figure grass, the blue of the sky
Because we see those first kinds

Of immense quiet as sleepers
While walking the dog in the hills
And store them for future use
As simile and metaphor, each
ancient and suspiciously free
Of present disaster. But today royally is
Blue and cloudless, this blue, this

Unironic absence of clouds over green
That makes you temporarily more
Intelligent, makes time harder to track
Until it seems it’s always been
Only this pleasure somewhere
Between hours in the form of a bell
Melting mid-ring. The poem’s now

Broken one of its rules in order
To keep ringing. Because I want to
Be smarter than true it continues
To disobey the trace of my injuries,
Remembering home is not a place
One at all leaves or gets to
But supremely anonymous

Relations with rhythm, a fragrance
Where skin meets time on which
No pronouns fall, here in the presence of.
Not lasting but repeatable and
Each of the instances claimed
For the series, belonging with the ones
That came before it, the others

Still to come but not in doubt,
Yesterday moving on top of tomorrow.
If blue were an all-day affair work
Didn’t tear us apart in, but held
As shape and song, the anonymous one
Playing on repeat, referencing nothing but
The very red distraction I attend to

Where bed turns each afternoon away
Along the suede sound of good decay
There’s still plenty of time to invent,
None of it spent in advance, then,
In intuition of every day to come,
The flowers lasting for more than a week,
Blue growing down to grass,
It would be like this.

> Geoffrey G. O'Brien <

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Happy Tuesday

The blithe swallows are flown

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I v y   L e a v e  Y o u

Elmwood Cemetery

Charlotte, North Carolina

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The warm sun is falling, the bleak wind is wailing,
The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,
And the Year
On the earth is her death-bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,
Is lying.

Come, Months, come away,
From November to May,
In your saddest array;
Follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And like dim shadows watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the nipped worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the Year;
The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each gone
To his dwelling.

Come, Months, come away;
Put on white, black and gray;
Let your light sisters play --
Ye, follow the bier
Of the dead cold Year,
And make her grave green with tear on tear.

> Percy Bysshe Shelley <

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Happy Monday

Itself to be imagined

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A   N a r r o w   V i s i o n

Flatiron Building

Asheville, North Carolina

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After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

> Wallace Stevens <

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Happy Friday

A sheer ocean of sky

>>>>++<<<<

V i r t u e   I s   A   P a t i e n c e

Detail :: Basilica of St. Lawrence

Asheville, North Carolina

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This morning’s raucous quiet: din of a lawnmower
Pulse-like swell of cicadas chattering in the brush
Trucks grumbling along a nearby highway.

Under a sea of high thin clouds, a sheer ocean of sky
The dead are islands: an archipelago
Of mute echoes, of resonant silence 

Their voices still within this gorgeous commotion --
Crow call, water burbling, wind rough in trees --
In a weed’s play, against skin, in the heart’s vibrations.

Under the racket of this day’s distractions
Under the birds’ clamorous singing
Under lapping waves of noise

Their stopped tongues their stilled voices speaking.

> Edward Falco <

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Happy Thursday

A kind of gold that speaks

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L i g h t i n g   t h e   W a y

Autumn Decorations

Columbia, South Carolina

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NIGHT THINKS IT'S CRYING AGAIN

and I keep listening to a song about autumn

where an apple tastes like longing and every leaf

in the maple tree tries to explain loss

through a series of colors -- hectic orange,

indifferent red, a kind of gold that speaks

directly to God or moonbeams and in the dark

as I drive down wet roadways watching for deer

the only things I can see clearly

are the yellow leaves christening

my windshield and I think how we are taught

not to love too many, too much, the night,

the darkness, and I believe I am crying but it is

only rain.

> Kelli Russell Agodon <

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Happy Wednesday

A hankering for the dust-light

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F a l l i n g

Front Yard White Oak

Columbia, South Carolina

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October, and leaves fall down. One feels the world go by.

First frost. And a licking sound

Just under the earth,

great wheels, or a sluice of some sort.

Sunlight thin as Saran Wrap.

A licking sound, the suck and bump of something against something.

One lives one's life in the word,

One word and a syllable, word and one syllable.

As though ice and its amulets could rise and rest us.

Whatever it is we look for is scattered, apart.

I have a thirst for the divine,

a long drink of forbidden water.

I have a hankering for the dust-light, for all things illegible.

I want to settle myself

Where the river falls on hard rocks,

where no one can cross,

Where the star-shadowed, star-colored city lies, just out of reach.

> Charles Wright <

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Happy Tuesday

Our season is now

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D r e a m l i k e   S t a t e

Old Brick Church Grounds

Jenkinsville, South Carolina

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One time I was almost ready to be born

before I had begun to remember

the palms of my hands had not yet unfurled

on the one tree of the whole of darkness

the tree before waiting the hearing tree

the left hand had not yet told the right hand

This is our time our season is now

the only time and you must wake and begin

to remember and to know who you are

you will come to remember but forgetting

comes on its own and you will try to tell what cannot be

told and you will have only

the old words and will try to use them

for the first time but the beginning

has gone from the words and there is no way

now to bring it back to them again

the right hand learns but the left hand is the prophet

Pain was waiting that time with her one key

long before the first daylight had appeared

> W.S. Merwin <

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Happy Monday :: Happy November

The whispering year is gone

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L i g h t   B a n t e r

Heritage Park

McDonough, Georgia

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I speak this poem now with grave and level voice
In praise of autumn, of the far-horn-winding fall.

I praise the flower-barren fields, the clouds, the tall
Unanswering branches where the wind makes sullen noise.

I praise the fall: it is the human season. Now
No more the foreign sun does meddle at our earth,
Enforce the green and bring the fallow land to birth,
Nor winter yet weigh all with silence the pine bough,

But now in autumn with the black and outcast crows
Share we the spacious world: the whispering year is gone:
There is more room to live now: the once secret dawn
Comes late by daylight and the dark unguarded goes.

Between the mutinous brave burning of the leaves
And winter’s covering of our hearts with his deep snow
We are alone: there are no evening birds: we know
The naked moon: the tame stars circle at our eaves.

It is the human season. On this sterile air
Do words outcarry breath: the sound goes on and on.
I hear a dead man’s cry from autumn long since gone.

I cry to you beyond upon this bitter air.

> Archibald MacLeish <

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Happy Friday

Earth's most radiant elements

>>>>++<<<<

B l a z i n g   a   T r a i l

Elmwood Cemetery

Charlotte, North Carolina

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In ethics class many years ago

our teacher asked this question every fall:

If there were a fire in a museum,

which would you save, a Rembrandt painting

or an old woman who hadn't many

years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs

caring little for pictures or old age

we'd opt one year for life, the next for art

and always half-heartedly. Sometimes

the woman borrowed my grandmother's face

leaving her usual kitchen to wander

some drafty, half-imagined museum.

One year, feeling clever, I replied

why not let the woman decide herself?

Linda, the teacher would report, eschews

the burdens of responsibility.

This fall in a real museum I stand

before a real Rembrandt, old woman,

or nearly so, myself. The colors

within this frame are darker than autumn,

darker even than winter -- the browns of earth,

though earth's most radiant elements burn

through the canvas. I know now that woman

and painting and season are almost one

and all beyond the saving of children.

> Linda Pastan <

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Happy Wednesday