Did you remember to set your clocks back last night? Or did you get that sweet treat of looking at your bedside clock and suddenly remembering, Oh, I have another hour? The days are darker now, but no colder yet. Enjoy the first real fall Sunday, and enjoy the poems below, happily lifted from this weekend’s Falling Back: Poems for Fall column in the Times.
Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends
into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing, as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
I don’t say
it’s easy, but
what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world
be true?
So let us go on
though the sun be swinging east,
and the ponds be cold and black,
and the sweets of the year be doomed.
— Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author, most recently, of “Swan: Poems and Prose Poems”
. . . . .
Light Verse
It’s just five, but it’s light like six.
It’s lighter than we think.
Mind and day are out of sync.
The dog is restless.
The dog’s owner is sleeping and dreaming of Elvis.
The treetops should be dark purple,
but they’re pink.
Here and now. Here and now.
The sun shakes off an hour.
The sun assumes its pre-calendrical power.
(It is, though, only what we make it seem.)
Now in the dog-owner’s dream,
the dog replaces Elvis and grows bigger
than that big tower
in Singapore, and keeps on growing until
he arrives at a size
with which only the planets can empathize.
He sprints down the ecliptic’s plane,
chased by his owner Jane
(that’s not really her name), who yells at him
to come back and synchronize.
— Vijay Seshadri, author of “The Long Meadow”
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