autumn

I cross autumn fields
 In my dew-laden robes
 On my return home.
 Flowers woefully withered,
 Evening has yet to arrive.


Sōgi

the ceremony

the poet said once leopards
they break into the temple and drink to the dregs
what is in the sacrificial pitchers,
this being repeated over and over again; finally
it can be calculated in advance,
and it becomes a part of the ceremony -
 

and you said too: you can guess why i said this.

yet the ceremony was taking place there, within her body bursting free through the night, her movements, sharp and hungry, tracing the outline of the field which was the only temple and the only thing which was repeated over and over again, at dawn, was how she broke down on her knees in front of the small thicket bearing white-glimmering flowers, out of breath, bruises on her skin, and had it been possible to calculate all this in advance and make her part of an order which wasn't hers, it wouldn't have been her any longer, and their delusion would have turned back against them, eventually, their gods blind and empty, their words hollow.

ah, the summer fields (2)

.

abundance of being

It is only that this warmth and movement are like
The warmth and movement of a woman.

It is not that there is any image in the air
Nor the beginning nor end of a form:

It is empty. But a woman in threadless gold
Burns us with brushings of her dress

And a dissociated abundance of being,
More definite for what she is—

Because she is disembodied,
Bearing the odors of the summer fields,

Confessing the taciturn and yet indifferent,
Invisibly clear, the only love.

Wallace Stevens, 

The Woman in Sunshine

(for James, thanking him for introducing me to this wonderful poem)

ah, the summer fields (1)

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Mary Oliver 

(from The Summer Day)

both

there is an autumn of luxuriance, of soft colours, deepened by rain and mist - 

an autumn which is but a different kind of spring, making me unsure of how time flows (and returns, always, to the same point). 

and there is an autumn of austere moods, of slow fading back to the roots of formlessness (except that there will always be, somewhere, quietly pulsing at the core of unadornedness, the blood of  berries - even in the snow its pulse will go on, a steady reminder of the same return). 

i am both autumns.

twenty years after

i have always hated the imposture of such titles, i found them unsettling even when i would read the books with delight, in those early years (those early years - saying this loud, with different accents, yields different meanings, none of them right, though). it is not in front of god that the soul is groundless, it is in front of memory.  

(and still no lover's lips pressed upon hers taste as excruciatingly bittersweet as those crushed petals, that day)

forget the world

.

before the names

I dream of the silence

the day before Adam came

to name the animals,

The gold skins newly dropped

from God's bright fingers, still

implicit with the light.

A day like this, perhaps:
a winter whiteness
haunting the creation,

as we are sometimes
haunted by the space
we fill, or by the forms

we might have known
before the names,
 beyond the gloss of things.


John Burnside 

.