leav-ing

This video is set to excerpts from these three poems and also a recording of my sibling (cello) and my mother (piano) and her dog Daisy (claw-scurrying on the kitchen floor), playing Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel" for my 50th birthday.

Linda Pastan, "October"
Who can mediate
between the body and its undoing?
At night in each of my limbs
I feel the skeletal tree ache,
and I dream of leaves
in their feverish colors, floating
through the small streams
and tributaries of the blood.
At noon in the smoldering woods
I gather black grapes
that purse and caress the mouth,
I gather thistles and burrs-
whole armfuls of dissolution,
while from a branch
the chuck-will's widow calls
forgive, forgive

Marie Ponsot, "The End of October"
Leaves wait as the reversal of wind
comes to a stop. The stopped woods
are seized of quiet; waiting for rain
bird & bug conversations stutter to a
stop.
Between the road
and the car in the road and me in the car,
and the woods
and the forms standing tall and the broken
forms and the small forms that crawl there,
the rain begins to fall. Rain-strands,
thin slips of vertical rivers, roll
the shredded waters out of the cloud
and dump them puddling to the ground.
Like sticks half-drowned the trees
lean so my eyes snap some into
lightning shapes, bent & bent.
I leave the car to wee where, lower,
the leaves of the shrubs beaten goldleaf
huddle together. In some spaces
nothing but rain appears.

Whatever crosses over
through the wall of rain
changes; old leaves are
now gold. The wall is
continuous, doorless. True,
to get past this wall
there's no need for a door
since it closes around me
as I go through.

Czeslow Milosz, "This Only"
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map leads him there.
Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun,
When snow first fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason,
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

POETIC THEMES
Last week I woke up and noticed my front tooth is turning gray. There's a meme of a tree in its full glory with the message, "The trees are about to show us how beautiful letting go can be." Last October I saw it and it struck me as very poignant. This year I saw it again and, for some reason, it made me furious! Something between Covid or my dog dying or my kid leaving for college or maybe perimenopause - who knows - calls bullshit on the beauty of letting go. I's not beautiful. It's just plain HARD. In a poem entitled "In a Northern Country," Linda Pastan confesses, "I'm tired of the way the seasons keep changing, / mimicking the seasons of the flesh which are real / and finite." Amen, sister. There's a fatigue that I recognize in Pastan that keeps me company. It's an exhaustion with the deterioration of the flesh. In "End of October" she wonders, "Perhaps beauty / is the mother of death, / not the other way around." There's a kind of crone-wisdom in perceiving that truth can be toothed, arresting and still tender. Nothing can mediate the ache of undoing as we watch our colorful leaves float on down the river. Buh-bye Youth and prettiness! Living is an exercise in loss, as we break down to skeleton. Still, the grapes that purse the mouth also caress it. Knowing as we do that we can't hold the world forever, our "armfuls of dissolution" are spiky, bristled - not pussy-willows but thistles and burrs.

In the autumn of our lives, not only do we experience minute by minute the dissolution of the body, but also an increased feeling of urgency to give up the ghosts. The rolling call of the nocturnal chuck-will widow, with all the implications of loss implied in its name, is beautiful until it is crazy-making, persisting as it does all. night. long. The cadenced onomatopoeia haunts us with its insistent repetition to forgive, forgive, before it's too late. The hard work of forgiving is not, in fact, about someone else's behavior, but about surrendering to our own past. What has been will be, and we need to decide what we're going to do with it. There's nothing complacent about forgiving; it's about making peace, in the sense of actively forging something out of nothing.

Marie Ponsot's "End of October" is another dissolution poem, where the leaves are low to the ground. The skeletal trees are in lightning shapes; all that is left are the leaves of the shrubs, huddled low and beaten gold. The transformation of old leaves turned gold gives a sense-based experience of the liminal, in the spaces between raindrops, between car and woods, between the witnesser and the autumn leaves, between human and animal. To enter this rain-drenched scene is not to pass through it but to become different in it - the doorless wall partitioning stages of change is continuous, and it closes around us as we move through. We huddle together, bent. 

A depiction of this transformation, "This Only" enacts a distillation of our needs as we age, redefining what is precious. The poem looks backward and forward at once, to a past winter when a traveler visited a valley down in the forest. In this first visit, some epiphanic moment dissolved him into the natural world. But the poem is set in autumn, with winter still to come. When the traveler returns years later, there's no sublime epiphany. It's more of a streamlining of need. "He wants only one, most precious thing / To see, purely and simply." With age we discover a kind of pure dissipation of self into our surround, the dissolving of ego that enables pure witness. At this edge, beyond and yet definitive of self, there is no fear or hope, only rhythm and joy and reasonlessness. From the perspective of the autumn of our lives, that time of year where leaves, or none, or few do hang, we can look forward to our winter crone wisdom that privileges presence - only. We are whittled down.

In an episode of "On Being" with Krista Tippett, John O'Donohue describes this process of distilling and streamlining, in the etymology of the word "threshold." Coming from the verb to thresh, to separate the grain from the husk, he describes the threshold as a line that separates "two territories of spirit." As we transition from one way of being to another, O'Donohue draws our attention to the question of how we cross over. To cross "worthily," he says, is to heal certain patterns of behavior that had us stuck or caught. He concludes, "It's a kind of homecoming for the enriched memory of your unfolding life." The kerfuffled verb tense of this last line recalls Milosz's: we are returning home to a memory of our future as we always knew it. The word "worthy" is an interesting choice, Biblical as it is and the root of the word "worship." What is it, then, to cross worthily? Perhaps it is to attend to every micro-detail, each worthy of our attention, so that we may dissolve what is and join with whatever future thing awaits. To worship every autumn leaf is to fully inhabit this threshold of change, this period of crossing over that promises the dissolution of ego and the discovery of true presence.

PRACTICE
Expressing the "skeletal tree ache" in movement is to find the sway inside stillness, the certain sadness in the extension of limbs. We could express longing and limit by reaching out our arms and gathering them back in, like Pastan's "armfuls of dissolution." There's a kind of threshold play in a physical exercise exploring boundaries: bringing your hands to the center of your chest, interlace your fingers, flip your palms to face away from you, and as you push the hands away, round your back and drop your head. It's sometimes nice to linger in this extension, maybe lifting one shoulder at a time. Then turn the palms to face inward and gather the interlaced hands back to the chest, lingering again as you receive the warm imprint of the palms on your chest. Go slowly, so you might check in with the space between letting go and longing and receiving and releasing again. Whatever crosses over changes. Notice the shifts in the streams and tributaries that flood from the heart center. Tune in to the flow of blood and energy from the trunk to the branched tips of fingers. Could you drop in deep enough to find Milosz's"edge where there is no I or not-I"? What does that zone feel like and how does it relate to forgiveness?