Midwestern autumn makes poetry resonate

Midwestern autumn makes poetry resonate
By KATHLEEN JOHNSON
Special to The Star

K eats called it the season “of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” Blake described it as “laden with fruit, and stained / With the blood of the grape.”
There’s something inherently poetic about autumn. The long, sultry days of summer become increasingly cool, crisp and short. Late-afternoon light stretches lambent across the lawn. And nature’s palette shifts: The hot yellows and golds of August ripen to bittersweet orange, sumptuous red, burnished copper.
It’s time to add a blanket to the bed and to make sure there’s a volume of worthwhile poems within reach on the nightstand. Poems gathered here travel through the months, capturing autumn’s various and changeable moods.
I’ll start with a short one of my own called “September Moon”:

Round and yellow
as the eye
of that great horned owl
whose call haunts
my dreams tonight.

A longer work about September, when “Summer like an old lion lies down / in the tawny weeds under the oak,” as Marge Piercy so aptly presents it, is her poem “The Equinox Rush.” Here’s an excerpt:

Everything quickens. Squirrels
rush to feed. Monarchs among
the milkweed raggedly zigzag
toward South America. Too early
for the final harvest, too early
to mulch and protect, too soon
to take off the screens, still
some sharp corner has been turned.
I am stirred to finish something.
A hint of cold frames the day
and compresses it. Urgency
is the drug of the moment.
Find a task and do it, the red
of the Virginia creeper warns.
The sunset is a brushfire.
I am hurrying, I am running hard
toward I don’t know what,
but I mean to arrive before dark.

Red flowers in October light inspired Sylvia Plath to write these memorable lines, the last, from “Poppies in October”: “O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open / In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.”
Philip Miller, a poet formerly from Kansas City, writes splendid autumn poems. Here are the beginning stanzas of “Again, Autumn”:

Today in deep October
I walk down the street,
sunshine flashing
from a few last leaves,
from car windows, from shining hair,
from every human eye
in the stream of hurrying passersby
headed toward the end
of an autumn day
with a little winter in the air,
and the dark coming early,
so that before they’re home,
city lights will twinkle
back on like stars.

I offer this playfully haunting Clement Hoyt haiku: “A Hallowe’en mask, / floating face up in the ditch, / slowly shakes its head.”
The tenor of late autumn is often melancholy. Colors mirror the mood: Vibrant blue skies fade to gray; maple leaves lose their flash, turn brittle and fall. In “November 9,” Ted Kooser evokes the transition:

The sky hangs thin and wet on its clothesline.
A deer of gray vapor steps through the foreground,
under the dripping, lichen-rusted trees.
Halfway across the next field,
the distance (or can that be the future?)
is sealed up in tin like an old barn.

Alas, autumn ends — and brings about its own endings. And so I’ll leave you with this haiku by the Japanese poet Buson, who reminds us that the language of poetry can be condensed to the point of heartbreak:

I go,
you stay;
two autumns.

FONTE: Kansas City Star - MO,USA

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