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A Thought for Today
Lies fly like butterflies but cannot
stand the sunlight.
Tomorrow the last month of
this summer comes to an end. While autumn officially began a week and a
half ago there is something about September’s end that makes it official.
Over the years I’ve written a lot about autumn; here’s the author’s
forward from my 1984 book “Suspension Bridge.” The last paragraph of it
seems particularly apt today.
Bridges
Some seasons stall or do not
come. They dawdle
past agreed appointments becoming useless to the nature need and thus
unnecessary hooks for memory. Spring stays spring so long it passes summer
in a lazy relay, becoming fall or one more page of spring.
New Year’s Day will oft-times entreat the summer to arrive - the man who
came to dinner stays and fills the first six months of a given year with
sunlight hard enough to make each twig a Diamond safety match awaiting
tinder-brush and hard rock August flint.
Who forgets the winter out of season, gone mad inside America’s middle ?
Flood and twister, fist hailstones in Denver June, Oklahoma redesigned as
lake, Montana ten months digging out in hopes commencement exercises can
be held on light green field... New York with alternate complaints of
Frigidaire and turned-up microwave. California one-year haywire from a
winter insurance carrier’s blot from memory, followed by a drought
confounding television weather personalities.
For me, the fall, however ill or well it comes, is paramount. I relive /
re-enhance first romances, glory in blue blossom trees that never fail.
Ever I entreat the white azaleas in the back garden to blossom, dry and
bloom again. I am at home in autumn, rain and dour countenance accepted.
Autumn is the time when seasons merge because of bare necessity. It is a
time of coming to and going from real reality.
Every poem out of me, choosing poem cycle then stacking high enough to be
a book, has square root in seasons. Nature is not the always arbiter -
there are those seasons of the heart, the groin, dreamed vacation, and
that damp day not coming often when the mind and tongue decide to merge.
One season is guised in nature and titled Winter in America. The
other chapters are soul seasons and less structured. They are the hard
parts: the meat in them remains inside the bones. Yet like the quartered
year is a bridge to neighbor.
I have come across my country again in all four seasons. I found it to be
healthy enough... its people resourceful, big friends in good humor. We
are all of us working toward the same ends.
R.M. / June 1984
THE FINAL
WORD
"I saw a
woman wearing a sweatshirt with 'Guess' on it. I said,
'Thyroid problem?" -Arnold Schwarzenegger
Do something nice for yourself and somebody else this weekend. Sleep warm.
RM 9/28/01
Details of Rod's next
appearance can be obtained by following the link below.
"Tap
Your Troubles Away" - the music of Jerry Herman
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