How quickly this time goes. Uninflected by daily memos and the duress of circumstance, carbonating our routines, this tonic air and pervious light of autumn comes into our lives. It burns off summer's humid residue from the blood, leavens the air with chilly jazz. The eyes shifts its palette into smeared primaries, thick impasto at the edges of sight, vision Monet-like in apprehension and dissolve. The bones ratchet with less grind, even hair loses its amnesia. The body for a moment bumps up against life and the two dance extravagant mazurkas, wicked tangos.
How quickly this time goes. John Gardner, in his book October Light, talks about "locking time," that slow deliquesce of heat from the earth that turns soil to iron, air to knives, sky to fist. One of the characters talks about how locking time always comes as a surprise. Its prelude shimmers with light and zip: leaves drained down to reds and yellows, Macintosh apples ballooned with sweetness, the corn chopped down, the hay taxed into bales and collected. Even veterans fool themselves into believing that this swell and tumble of abundance can survive the lapse of the earth around the sun. And then one morning frost rimes the window corners, thin ice bolts across shallow water. Locking time has started; before long the world will think in parsimony, everything, as the singer Lui Collins puts it, "hung in suspension awaiting the snow."
How quickly this time goes. Every year I promise myself to travel to every apple orchard, stand of raspberry canes, and cornfield to splurge in the ripe muchness that reports from the land. Every year I promise myself a pilgrimage and every year I side-journey somewhere else, usually too busied with making a living to actually live. And then I feel my own locking time, feel the mud of my guts turn to hardpan and the sap rescind its sweetness. And I know I've missed it again, failed to make my imagination press some quickening cider from the time, can some preserves against the January lees. Next year, I say, next year, knowing there are fewer years each year I can say that.
Perhaps this is too dour. There is spring in this fall as well. Autumn makes us slough off summer's Eden, reminds us that even locking time, even the cold rind of February, even this season of our own mortal thoughts can be a season for living. Autumn tells us that the thing is to live at all, to get "some" even as the "much" slips away, and grasp that some as if all life, like the red wheelbarrow, depended on it. This is an invigorating desperation, calling us to rise and leave Paradise. No Pascal's wager on this one; all we can do is breathe deep, look hard, and keep the furnaces stoked.
(October 1996)