A hazy shade of winter

 

The summer has finally left, and the rains returned.

The winter is not far off.

I love the autumn, the somber, reflective mood fits me very well...although I sometimes miss the crisp dry chill of the Octobers of my Midwestern childhood. The Northwest lacks the fiery colors, as well; our deciduous trees are dominated by the bigleaf maple, Acer macrophyllum, which does turn a handsome golden-yellow but briefly; the leaves wither and brown up as quickly as they turn.

The days grow short, the shadows long, and another year draws to a close.

Dreaming in Mid-winter

An Archaeology of Snow Forts

There’s not much left to be said
Some well-washed stone hasn't heard before.

History is composed of broken walls and bad neighbors:
Just ask these chips from Berlin, the Parthenon and Cathay
Or these cool magma hands of Pompeii, dark and grey.

If you listen carefully in the right place
On University Avenue, you will learn
There is a minor wall near the Yalu River
Dancing on the hills of Qin for the moon,

Who knows exactly what I mean
In every tongue worth mention.

She’s moonlighting as a curved garden serpent
Coiling around old Laocoon,
The Suspicious One with his astute eye,
Crooning with a sly wink,

"Come, touch true history."

And how the moon must laugh when she spies
The tiniest hill in Minnetonka,
Where the small hands of the earth have erected

A magnificent white wall,
A snowy miniature Maginot
Raised some scant hours before,
Already melting into a hungry, roiling river
Who is not yet finished eating Louisiana for brunch.

~ Bryan Thao Worra

No particular reason. Just loved this poem, and the thought of a minor wall in the mountains above the Yalu dancing in the moonlit snow.

The Short Sobs of the Violins of Autumn

The violins of autumn don't get much of a solo around here. More like a two-bar bridge and then it's off to the drizzling continuo of winter rain. "Fall color" lasts from about 2:45 to 4:50 on November 1 every year; after that the rains knock all the bright leaves down to where they form a glutineous mass in every catchbasin and a slimy coating on level ground.

I still love the autumn. But the Northwest version isn't the sort of thing that inspires poets and balladeers. It's just the introduction to the Dark Ages of winter, and much as we try and enjoy it the pleasure is fleeting.

The Painters Depart

The hard bright skies and drought of summer are passing.

Mornings are turning cool.

The rains have returned, fitful late summer rains that bring with them the sullen bump and rumble of night thunder. The streets steam in the afternoons with the aftermath of the sunshowers.

The small urban animals have suddenly appeared in haste to find their winter's stores; the several species common to the city, the survivors and the scavengers and the scroungers willing or able to live close by Man. Starlings and scrub jays, squirrels and opossums and raccoons all reappear after their long summer loafing scrabbling for the late-summer fruits and the provender of the tray feeders as the closing of the Door into Summer warns them the long cold nights of winter are coming.

The schools reopen, the children, the adolescents, and the young men and women pulled back into them, disappearing from the streets like the lost children of Hamelin.

Somehow the rhythm of the workweek is changed by the absence of these smaller people, as if the knowledge that they, too, are back to their work makes my own workday different.

The house-painters finish their work, touch up the last of the thin spots, take up their dropcloths and their paint rags and depart. The clean whiteness of the siding shines brighter gemmed with raindrops, the trim crisp gold and greed standing out from the new coating.

On the front porch the old fir planking shines rich red-brown, released from ninety years of darkness under layer upon layer of paint.

The Befreiungskrieg Mojo and I waged with our stripping gel and sandpaper fought through the wire-belts and bunker-lines of the years, beginning with our own forest green down through the gray left by The Former People to colors of which we had no understanding. Who had thought that the gaudy Christmas-Time Green was a good idea? Or the fire-engine red? And more gray? How much gray does a house porch need? Light gray, dark gray, medium gray...fifty shades of gray or more.

At bottom the wood of douglas-firs long reaped, nicked and scarred and darkened by long wear and hard use. Wood for the working day, cull of the straight-grain Twenties but clearer and smoother than anything sold as prime lumber today. Wood that feels smooth and clean under the hand and glows with antique character as I sweep the coats of lacquer across it.

In the grass of the yard outside the summer-sere gives way to the first return of green. A scattering of leaves whirls down, the first of autumn's cascade. Spiderwebs banner bush and limb and trail across your face as you pass; the garden spiders seem to suddenly appear in late summer with the other urban wildlife in a final burst of energy before the cold.

All of this I observe in passing, because the other late-summer change has been the rude uprising in my workweek. For most of the last half of August and the first week of September I have risen, dressed, and departed in darkness and returned in darkness as well.

I have observed the changes I've described almost as a passerby, stopping to assess the changes in a place he often visits but does not dwell. Noting the gross differences in color and shape, the subtle alteration of habit and use.

Smiling the secret smile of knowledge shared with strangers, at the shared recognition of small details that only the familiarity of long acquaintance can lend.

Late Summer

Before the moths have even appeared
to orbit around them, the streetlamps come on,
a long row of them glowing uselessly

along the ring of garden that circles the city center,
where your steps count down the dulling of daylight.
At your feet, a bee crawls in small circles like a toy unwinding.

Summer specializes in time, slows it down almost to dream.
And the noisy day goes so quiet you can hear
the bedraggled man who visits each trash receptacle

mutter in disbelief: Everything in the world is being thrown away!
Summer lingers, but it’s about ending. It’s about how things
redden and ripen and burst and come down. It’s when

city workers cut down trees, demolishing
one limb at a time, spilling the crumbs
of twigs and leaves all over the tablecloth of street.

Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims
while beside him blooms a large gray rose of pigeons
huddled around a dropped piece of bread.

~ Jennifer Grotz

Solstice

To Juan at the Winter Solstice

There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling,
Whether are learned bard or gifted child;
To it all lines or lesser gauds belong
That startle with their shining
Such common stories as they stray into.

Is it of trees you tell, their months and virtues,
Or strange beasts that beset you,
Of birds that croak at you the Triple will?
Or of the Zodiac and how slow it turns
Below the Boreal Crown,
Prison of all true kings that ever reigned?

Water to water, ark again to ark,
From woman back to woman:
So each new victim treads unfalteringly
The never altered circuit of his fate,
Bringing twelve peers as witness
Both to his starry rise and starry fall.

Or is it of the Virgin's silver beauty,
All fish below the thighs?
She in her left hand bears a leafy quince;
When, with her right she crooks a finger smiling,
How may the King hold back?
Royally then he barters life for love.

Or of the undying snake from chaos hatched,
Whose coils contain the ocean,
Into whose chops with naked sword he springs,
Then in black water, tangled by the reeds,
Battles three days and nights,
To be spewed up beside her scalloped shore?

Much snow is falling, winds roar hollowly,
The owl hoots from the elder,
Fear in your heart cries to the loving-cup:
Sorrow to sorrow as the sparks fly upward.
The log groans and confesses
There is one story and one story only.

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed.

~ Robert Graves

(Thanks to my friend mike, who posted this beautiful poem to Facebook)

Winter is Coming

The rains have settled in, and the morning chill is thick with the dank reek of wet leaves.

Autumn is here, and winter is coming.

(h/t to the incredibly gifted Amy Mebberson and her adorable Pocket Princesses for the cartoon)

Beginning Autumn

On the porch in September a brown spider
in its web. There are deaths that come so quietly.

Over the mountains, the half moon rising.
Behind the fence a neighbor's dog howls in the dark.

No matter what the poet says a yellow leaf
asks nothing. The green wail of spring is what I want.

When you follow the shoreline out of sight,
I listen to ocean in an empty shell.

I never intended my life to turn out this way.
How solitary the drifting boat on the water.

~ Jeanne Lohmann

The summer is winding to a close here in the Northwest. The tomatoes are still proffering their August bounty but the red harvest is dew-frosted in the mornings now, and the fat heirlooms are cracking in the cool nights. The grass is still sere but the green is creeping back in after the first of the autumn rains.

The pictures of the back of the house are testimony to my irritating parsimony. Despite the repeated warnings that "replacing gutters is often difficult and a professional roofer may be a long-term savings" I went ahead with replacing Missy's back roof gutter, and a nasty, unpleasant job it was. I can see a visible belly in the damn thing, and the brackets I used did not do a particularly adequate job of holding the inside of the gutter against the roofline, so I had to go back and hang some flashing to route the runoff into the gutter. It's the worst sort of jury-rigging, but it works, and as my old drill sergeant was wont to say; if it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid...

I hope you are starting to see the signs of autumn, despite the poet's wail for spring, it is my favorite season of the year.

September 1, 2012

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

~ W.H. Auden (September 1, 1939)

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces' pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

~ Dorothy Parker

Black Months

Let the rain kiss you
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops
Let the rain sing you a lullaby
The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk
The rain makes running pools in the gutter
The rain plays a little sleep song on our roof at nightAnd I love the rain.

~ Langston Hughes

Last Summer Days

Gorgeous Indian-summer day in Portland; I had work up in the far northeast of Vancouver, Washington, monitoring infiltration tests though the lazy, sunny afternoon. Cool enough for crispness - the meadowgrass was white with frost when I arrived in the predawn - but warming to pleasantly shirtsleeve temperatures by afternoon. A light wind from the south bringing on it the dry tartness of fallen leaves, the sultry scent of woodsmoke, and the high, clear iciness of the late October sky.

It gave me time to sit on my tailgate, book neglected at my side, and just enjoy the beauty of the last of summer and the brief, bright autumn we pass through so quickly before the gray rains of winter begin.

XXXIX

When summer's end is nighing
  And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
  And all the feats I vowed
  When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset
  Would lose the slanted ray,
And I would climb the beacon
  That looked to Wales away
  And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven
  The hues of evening died;
Night welled through lane and hollow
  And hushed the countryside,
  But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall
  In converse high would stand,
Late, till the west was ashen
  And darkness hard at hand,
  And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy
  The lessening day might close,
But air of other summers
  Breathed from beyond the snows,
  And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not
  And come no more anew;
And all the years and seasons
  That ever can ensue
  Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming
  On eves when autumn nighs:
The ear too fondly listens
  For summer's parting sighs,
  And then the heart replies.

~A.E. Housman (Last Poems)

Sun!

It must be the depths of winter when the mere absence of clouds and mizzle makes me as giddy as an opium fiend and as excited as a debutante.
I'd blog some more, but the sunny day beckons like a scantily-clad houri.

Summer's End

The cool mornings and slanting light of evening are reminding me that our summer is drawing to a close.

Unlike the East Coast, this year Portland's summer has been brief, cool, and drizzly. We've had almost no hundred degree days, few of the brutal dog-mouth days that make you want to set in the shade and do nothing.Now the nights will draw out, and clouds lour in, and the cold rains of autumn begin.

"For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go."

- George Washington Cable

September

"I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.
I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air."
- Theodore Roethke, The Far Field

The Girls In Their Summer Dresses

One nice thing about the warm weather is that the heavy clothes come off.

Nice, for me, because I like the freedom of going without heavy shoes, heavy coats, everything heavy, encompassing; I like the warmth without having to dress to obtain it.

And also nice, in that everyone else gets to come out of their winter clothes and into their light shirts and sandals.

And the Portland women, and girls, so dark and dour through the winter in their rainjackets, fleece, and heavy shoes bloom in a delicious profusion of color and movement.Floaty summer dresses, pretty tops in bright, sunny colors. Toes painted like candy lighten up sandals and flip-flops. Even their movements seem lighter and more joyful. They're lovely, and I enjoy their sudden emergence from winter's drizzly hibernation.

One odd thing I have noticed this summer more than before, though, is the number of women (in particular, though I've been seeing men doing this, too) cycling in flip-flops. This seems peculiarly dangerous; as a kid I scraped the hell out of my foot when I blew out of a cheap rubber flip-flop riding my bike. In a bike-y town like Portland it seems odd that so many people are riding this way. But, there, I'm always amazed at how many Portlanders ride without helmets. Perhaps the cycling-in-flips is just part of the casual style of this town. Seems chancy to me...

One family member who is NOT so enthused about the weather is our little cat Lily. She hates the heat and spends much of her time sleeping in the shade or trying to find shade. That, and she always gets flea-ridden this time of year. She is allergic to their bites and tears at herself until the fleabane medicine and the winter's cold drive them away again.

Speaking of bicycling, I drove home from the Timbers game tonight - nice 2-nil win over Miami - and had to stop at the corner of Willamette and Parks to let a group of riders go by. I turned down Willamette and found that the entire bike lane was full of people on bikes; cruisers, hybrids, trail-a-bikes, unicycles...people wearing tutus, tuxedos, neon, wizard's hats, bridal gowns, all manner and color of chemlight glowsticks sprouting from bikes, helmets, and riders.

Turns out that this is something called the "Night Ride", and it happens every July. I couldn't resist; I stopped at the corner of N. McKenna and Willamette, found someone's put-out-for-the-taking chest of drawers sitting in the city strip along Willamette, and leaned on it watching the show. The riders looked like they were having a great time; there was lots of laughter, lots of bells ringing and little horns honking. I waved to the cheerful unable to stifle a silly grin myself. It was all very goofy, and very Portland. I stayed and enjoyed the impromptu night parade until the last little group of stragglers passed by and left the street to the cold streetlights and the silent houses.

But now it's late, and I have to get to bed.

Hope your summer Sunday is a good one.

The Rains Return

I woke early this morning to the sound of rain.

It's early still, but soon our skies will change. The unmade world has already begun to prepare for the coming winter; skeins of geese have begun to knit up in the late summer mornings, the first leaves are curling up, our urban fauna, the squirrels and jays, have become more bold in their search for food.

The return of the rains is a time of year I meet with a bit of melancholy. I like the autumn. I am, on balance, an Octoberish sort of man, and am most in harmony with the world when it is past its summer floresence. But the autumns of my youth, the falls I learned first to love, were the dry, hard, crisp season of the Midwest. The Northwest's sodden November has always been less congenial, and I have never learned to embrace it the same way.

But there's still something very restful about being inside, and warm, and dry, safe abed, listening to the sound of the rain outside.

August Night

On a midsummer night, on a night that was eerie with stars,
...In a wood too deep for a single star to look through,
You led down a path whose turnings you knew in the darkness,
...But the scent of the dew-dripping cedars was all that I knew.

I drank of the darkness, I was fed with the honey of fragrance,
...I was glad of my life, the drawing of breath was sweet;
I heard your voice, you said, 'Look down, see the glow-worm!'
...It was there before me, a small star white at my feet.

We watched while it brightened as though it were breathed on and burning,
...this tiny creature moving over earth's floor . . .
'L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,'
...You said, and no more.(Sara Teasdale)

Gold

Perhaps one of the most beautiful sights of a Northwest autumn is the Bigleaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum), the common hardwood of our hills and coastal forests.All through the Oregon Coast Range these maples fill the openings in the coniferous forest that covers most of these hills.

For most of the year, and in most autumns, the tree merely contributes to the thick leaf litter and duff that carpets the forest floor.

Now, in most years the rains arrive in late September or early October and the fall colors are brief and muted. Rain knocks the leaves down quickly, and the wet churns them to the muddy brown that colors most of our autumns.

But when the rains don't arrive, and the Indian summer pushes well into October, as this one's has...then the maples take the opportunity to blazon the hillsides with the gold peculiar to the species.The forests blaze with this golden light, and the dark coniferous hillsides seem to be lit from within, a lumineria spilling down the steep slopes of the Coast Range.

So for your enjoyment, a bit of autumn color from the sunny Northwest.

Enjoy it, for, as the slave holding the laurel crown over your head is whispering; like fame, its time is fleeting and soon the rains will fall.

End of Summer

Can you feel the seasons begin to turn?

I stepped out onto the porch yesterday morning and the air had a clean snap to it, a transparent blue chill that the soft cool haze of summer just lacks.

We've already had a couple of pouring rains; I love lying in the quiet house at night, listening to the drumming of late summer rain on the roof, the rush and gurgle of the gutters draining, the soundless feel of the parched ground soaking up the moisture.

(By late September the joy is gone - the Rains have come to stay and the novelty of a wet evening is spent.)

It's almost time to take in the hammock, to roll the plastic kid pool against the fence.

It's almost time to mulch the garden and cut the remaining roses back hard.

It's almost the End of Summer.An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.

I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones
Amaded, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.

Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was forever over.

Already the iron door of the North
Clangs open: birds,leaves,snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.

Stanley Kunitz