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”