After Apple-picking, after Frost

With Frost, it’s all about frost. He’s got

a crop to harvest. That’s what it seems like.

I don’t mind that he’s a curmudgeon. I heard

he was a bad father. Who knows what kind of husband?

I only know him as a poet, a swinger of birches—used to be, anyway.

I know him as somebody who outwalked the furthest city lights,

as one acquainted with the night. And so on.

He didn’t know if the world would end in fire.

Or in ice. And once by the pacific (should I say

“Once by the Pacific” since that is what he said?)

he intoned the glum evangelist’s ire:

“It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage.”

Why not? I’ve loved his Ingmar-American-Bergman nod—

(“Word was I was in my life alone/Word was I had no one left but God.”)

Cold comfort there, despite the moth-bit, hand-knit sweaters.

He’s spot on; we die—by fire or ice, what does it matter?

And in “After Apple-picking” he’s tired, a pane of glass

From the drinking trough that’s just ice just shatters.

It’s no mirror, no clue whether he will sleep for good

or just sleep somehow. But he says, without doubt,

“I’m done for apple-picking now.”

But I have been picking of late from this delicate harvest,

A tall daughter beside me, reaching beyond me.  

Our fingers sticky, our sacks heavy, our feet in the mud

No foreboding or theology in our late summer plunder.

No Frost to chide me, tramping through trees—

Ambrosia and Empire, Winesap and Spies—all the names runes

for Eden’s lost promise.

Unless Frost and God were both a bit wrong—

and what a wonder, what resurrection—

if there were still summer in fall. 

..

Summer, Still

I do. I take umbrage at James Taylor's vapid lyric "The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time." It seems important to disagree with it. There are many secrets to life, no doubt--both wise bons mots and jovial slogans (that ever-ready cliche among them: "Don't-sweat-the-small-stuff-It's-all-small-stuff." I think not).

But enjoying the passage of time seems wrong-headed to me. My high school boyfriend, that Carlos-Castenada-reading, mushroom-eating, percussionist jazzbo, used to tell me to 'be in the moment.' He was angling for sex, of course. Even then, though, I knew that in the larger scheme of things he was right. You've got to be in the moment because the moment--well, it passes. It passes really fast.

This is why when I was nineteen and discovered the famous Dylan Thomas poem, "Fern Hill," I got really depressed. "Fern Hill" is a florid recollection of Thomas' early years spent at a farm in Wales. It is here that he experiences the sense of being green and carefree, famous among the barns/About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home....

But by the third stanza he's singing another tune. Or better yet to say he's read the writing on the wall and it's all about mortality. His own and by extension, everybody's. At night, Time, (personified with even less charm than Max von Sydow as Death in "The Seventh Seal") is bearing the farm--and youth and life--away, never a nanno-second to be returned to him or to be re-lived again. By the poem's end we get the sad lament:

Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

This made me seriously sad when I was nineteen. I think it still does. Mostly I try not to think of "Fern Hill." Nor of Dylan Thomas' own early and drunken demise.

But there are moments, as there was one today, walking back from teaching a class, that the haunting lines came back to me:

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades,that Time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Summer's ending, I reminded myself. Fall term has begun. The miserable epiphany of "Fern Hill" has me in its cross hairs once again.

And I haven't worn my bathing suit all summer.
I have not eaten enough sweet corn.
I have not spent enough time with those I love.

And there is only one antidote.

The story is told of the Buddha after his enlightenment. He is returning to the city and encounters a man who is astonished by his radiance.

The man stopped and asked, “My friend, what are you? Are you a celestial being or a god?”
"No," said the Buddha
"Well, then, are you some kind of magician or wizard?"
Again the Buddha answered, "No."
"Are you a man?"
"No."
"Well, friend, what then are you?"

The Buddha replied, “I am awake.”