This season I find myself welcoming, even craving, the blue hour deepening to black. My moods shift frequently and want more space, and quiet, than daylight and activity allow. It’s a bit odd, since I almost entirely missed the summer sun and garden, pre-occupied with endless sorting and winnowing and boxing and giving-away and shredding and discarding STUFF. That is done. So is the painting and the refinishing of floors.
Only in the past few days have I been able to get outside for a few hours to cut down the dead blackberry canes, the brown, dried stalks of Joe Pye, echinacea, and mullein. According to my garden log, in other years I have finished shutting down the garden as late as December 27. Still, that work seems unseasonal this week.
The lengthening dark somehow offers a balm to my disrupted seasonal rhythms that involves curviness and word-play, a different flavor of sitting in the dark.
this lengthening dark
by Sara Eisenberg
this lengthening dark
this early dark
draws
me
in
twenty-one more nights
geminated
resolve
me
on-
ward
mood-
blue slopes
clarify space
trewe as any bonde
true as innocence
true as magnet
to iron true
and
pauseless
as the pulses
as true as Tristram
and Isolde were true
as stars true as I live
wildly irreverent
For my poet-loving readers: can you match the “true-ism” to the author?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning “true as magnet to iron”
Geoffrey Chaucer “true as innocence”
John Dryden “true as stars”
John Keats “true as I live”
Walter Savage Landor “trewe as any bonde”
Thomas Moore “true and pauseless as the pulses”
William Shakespeare “as true as Tristram and Isolde were”