 AUTUMN
In Chinese medicine autumn represents the METAL PHASE and corresponds
with our lungs, the emotions of grief and sadness, the color
white, the harvest and decline, and the beginnings of the year’s
decline into introversion and eventually death. Poetry that nourishes
the spirit of our Metal Elements is filled with the correspondences
of autumn and the Metal
Phase.
RETURN
In autumn the light changes.
Vibrance settles
Into the muted anxiousness
Of winter coming.
At sunset branches hang
With leaves, quiet
Waiting for nightfall
And the growing depths
Of restoration
In the coming months
When rain will quiet
The stupidity of the city
And follow the narrow
Undulating path
Deep into the reservoir
Of hope for all things.
Clouds darken thickening air,
A dove puffs its feathers
Shivering on the wire
As the great sky engulfs
The last shadows of summer.
The deep sense
At the marrow of life
Remembers the shifting course
Of light
Across the heavens
And the chill of returning home
To the sap of remembrance
Where life’s blood runs thin
Before the company of awareness
To fill it
With the substance
Of meat and meditation
In the stillness
That is
Autumn.
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RETURN:
More than any other season, I have always felt closest in my
soul to autumn: for its downward introspection, sadness, melancholy,
and other reasons I cannot describe. Although Return is not a
poem about grief (as many other poems in the Metal section of
my book are), it captures the feeling of autumn, and especially
the stark, still, vacancy that is palpable in the air during
autumn. My favorite part of the poem is the line about the marrow
of life, which corresponds with winter. These lines beckon autumn
into the depths of winter, which of course, is where we must
also go, along with and as nature, to celebrate both of these
seasons.
Central to autumn are the air and the breath. I wrote Return to capture that
poignant feeling in the air of autumn that I love so much and which touches
me so deeply and indescribably. This poem is an attempt to convey that special
essence of autumn, and thereby honor this season outwardly and inwardly.
A note about the voice of the poem. I have struggled with the voice of this
poem over the years since I wrote it, especially evident in the beginning stanza.
It is a reporter’s voice that states the facts in a seemingly “unpoetic” way.
At different times I have judged the poem for being “unpoetic” and
changed the voice. But, then I have always ended up changing the voice back
to the original reporter’s voice. This is because although another voice
seemed more “poetic,” it never felt right.
I came to realize that the reporter’s voice captures the matter-of-factness,
the poignancy, the blatant, unencumbered energy of autumn as the essence of
autumn’s true poetry. The reporter’s voice of the poem, then, is
very poetic. Finally trusting this voice, I confirmed autumn for myself, and
maybe even a morsel for autumn too.
In this process of checking deeply into the voice of a poem is a metaphor and
a lesson. Regardless of what we do, it is the voice, the feeling in our hearts,
of what we are doing, that is the ultimate determiner of what is poetry and
what is not, of what is meaningful for us or not. Of what is the truth, or
not. To trust this voice, this naturalness in ourselves, is to discover our
true poetry and our heartfelt place in the world. True poems convey the truth,
even if they need to lie now and then.
(Click
on the symbols below) 
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