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Looking for a New England aster
Oct. 7th, 2009 12:54 pm
Currently at UW: 9. High today: 12, at midnight.
I seem to be acquiring some new sensitivity to fall. The weather lately has been fantastic (though nothing as breathtakingly awesome as this, which I just heard of for the first time a couple of months ago). From the bus coming out of Downsview subway station yesterday, some ten miles and a nice slope above downtown, the skyscrapers (and only they) were half-enveloped by a towering, rolling cloud of mist that the slightly sunlit land had just sucked in from the lake. There were waterspouts in the forecasts for the Great Lakes last week, and plenty of lake-effect showers all around. I don't know how I ever thought that the fall was the time between summer weather and winter weather. There is a lot going on, busy and undecided.
But what I have come to tell you is that I have, for some reason, just this year noticed these purple--incandescently purple, from a certain angle, in a certain light, or out of the corner of your eye--flowers blooming everywhere by the side of the highway, blooming just now that everything else but the eternally ubiquitous goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace is finished. Why have I never noticed these purple flowers before? (The last few years that I wrote poems, they were mostly about seasons, but ... the seasons were mine before I was the seasons'? At my PhD supervisor's retirement party, he spoke about--I can't remember him speaking about anything else--the rhythm, the round dance, rising and falling, swelling and contracting, of the seasons. I keep thinking of that.) And then it struck me: these flowers of the fall, last to bloom, are they, aren't they, they must be! the last lone aster, in a few weeks gone. After a while I remembered to look up asters, and discovered that there is (of all things) a New England aster, found mostly all over North America east of the Rockies, and then after another while I found the time (do you know what it is, in Greek, to find the time, the leisure (which, let me tell you, right this minute I have not found but dug out with a plough), in which you might turn your attention away from vital matters to serious ones? It's to find the scholē) to wander up toward the woodlot at York, where I thought there probably must be some of these purple flowers, and before I got there there they were beside me in a flower bed run wild.
Let me ask you something: have you ever watched the moon rise? I have only ever done it once, by accident. Maybe I said so here, I don't know. I remember saying somewhere that watching the moon rise, I could understand why people have seen the moon as a god. I haven't done it since--years ago.
I seem to be acquiring some new sensitivity to fall. The weather lately has been fantastic (though nothing as breathtakingly awesome as this, which I just heard of for the first time a couple of months ago). From the bus coming out of Downsview subway station yesterday, some ten miles and a nice slope above downtown, the skyscrapers (and only they) were half-enveloped by a towering, rolling cloud of mist that the slightly sunlit land had just sucked in from the lake. There were waterspouts in the forecasts for the Great Lakes last week, and plenty of lake-effect showers all around. I don't know how I ever thought that the fall was the time between summer weather and winter weather. There is a lot going on, busy and undecided.
But what I have come to tell you is that I have, for some reason, just this year noticed these purple--incandescently purple, from a certain angle, in a certain light, or out of the corner of your eye--flowers blooming everywhere by the side of the highway, blooming just now that everything else but the eternally ubiquitous goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace is finished. Why have I never noticed these purple flowers before? (The last few years that I wrote poems, they were mostly about seasons, but ... the seasons were mine before I was the seasons'? At my PhD supervisor's retirement party, he spoke about--I can't remember him speaking about anything else--the rhythm, the round dance, rising and falling, swelling and contracting, of the seasons. I keep thinking of that.) And then it struck me: these flowers of the fall, last to bloom, are they, aren't they, they must be! the last lone aster, in a few weeks gone. After a while I remembered to look up asters, and discovered that there is (of all things) a New England aster, found mostly all over North America east of the Rockies, and then after another while I found the time (do you know what it is, in Greek, to find the time, the leisure (which, let me tell you, right this minute I have not found but dug out with a plough), in which you might turn your attention away from vital matters to serious ones? It's to find the scholē) to wander up toward the woodlot at York, where I thought there probably must be some of these purple flowers, and before I got there there they were beside me in a flower bed run wild.
Let me ask you something: have you ever watched the moon rise? I have only ever done it once, by accident. Maybe I said so here, I don't know. I remember saying somewhere that watching the moon rise, I could understand why people have seen the moon as a god. I haven't done it since--years ago.
