Unseen in September

[Image: Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) :: 1950 :: Jackson Pollock, by Chris Van Pelt on Flickr]

From whiskey river (excerpted there; this is the whole poem):

Three Songs at the End of Summer

A second crop of hay lies cut
and turned. Five gleaming crows
search and peck between the rows.
They make a low, companionable squawk,
and like midwives and undertakers
possess a weird authority.

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Across the lake the campers have learned
to water ski. They have, or they haven’t.
Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone
suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!”

Cloud shadows rush over drying hay,
fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine.
The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod
brighten the margins of the woods.

Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts;
water, silver-still, and a vee of geese.

*

The cicada’s dry monotony breaks
over me. The days are bright
and free, bright and free.

Then why did I cry today
for an hour, with my whole
body, the way babies cry?

*

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket…
In my childhood
I stood under a dripping oak,
while autumnal fog eddied around my feet,
waiting for the school bus
with a dread that took my breath away.

The damp dirt road gave off
this same complex organic scent.

I had the new books — words, numbers,
and operations with numbers I did not
comprehend — and crayons, unspoiled
by use, in a blue canvas satchel
with red leather straps.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

(Jane Kenyon [source])

…and:

We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is.

(Alan Watts [quoted various places (e.g. here), apparently from a book called The Way of Liberation])

Not from whiskey river:

September
(excerpt from “The Months”)

Their summer romance
over, the lovers
still cling
to each other

the way the green
leaves cling
to their trees
in the strange heat

of September, as if
this time
there will be
no autumn.

(Linda Pastan [source])

…and:

For real adventure, on days like today — when the sky was most outrageously blue, outlining the yellow-orange leaves most shockingly — as if by some mysterious telepathic signal The Boy and his friends would gather on the way to school for a round of Cement’s Poison or, increasingly of late, Cement Tag.

Cement’s Poison had a certain abstract appeal to The Boy’s sense of horror: if you set so much as the mere corner of the sole of a shoe upon a cement sidewalk or curb, you would die. Worse, you might be instantly resurrected and have to continue on your way to school. (Asphalt, macadam, and the grass of neighbors’ yards were not poison; they harbored dangers of other sorts.) The challenge for The Boy or any of his friends was enormous; this was not the countryside, where they could get to school without seeing any concrete at all or, if they did see any, could whistle for Paw’s prize heifer to bear them on her back across the toxic strip. No. This was a town: heifers were presumably against the law here, and every block was ringed in treacherous concrete. Misjudge your leap or hesitate and you could get hung up horribly, one foot on grassy safety and one foot on the root of a tree, your ankles wobbling, your little body stretched painfully over the cement, like a rubber band, your little voice squeaking, squeaking, in an audible agony over the children you most likely would never be able to sire, even if you lived.

Cement Tag, on the other hand, raised the terror a Gothic notch higher, by adding a human element: cement was no longer poison, but rather the only place where you could be pursued and tagged by It.

It was called that precisely because there were no words for it. It had no face, no name, and It was vaguely related to The Boogieman. But Its anonymity made it worse. It was It only when your back was turned; when you faced It, it became Jimmy, Steve, Richard, Lindsay, or Mouse. You couldn’t run backwards because you might trip on a tree root breaking through a sidewalk, and as you fell onto your back your last thought — just before becoming It yourself — would be, I was wrong, it wasn’t one of the guys, it was It.

(JES, from How It Was: Autumn)

…and finally, the great Sarah Vaughan:

[Below, click Play button to begin September Song. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 5:47 long.]

[Lyrics]