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Show THE BEGINNING OF AUTUMN The day has barely lifted before the rain begins, and I sit down at the desk littered with unanswered letters and look out into the garden abandoned now to ragweed and sour-grass. The gentians we planted have been dead for weeks, but still their stalks turn strangely green, and the spent leaves, too, scattered on the ground around them: it is the illusion of water and light, of light playing on water, playing in the mind, until the mind becomes part of the Illusion. A few hours ago, waking in the dark, I could see beyond the window these same clouds, heavy and back-lit by the moon, coming up from the south, and all I could think was I could not hold them back, could not keep them out of our lives. But look, instead, what a quiet now is settling on the world: at the other end of the house, Lynne is still sleeping, the fir trees are murmurring above their pitted roots, the dry earth softening to shadow. And it seems that hours from now, though everything else might have changed again, this same slow rain will still be filling the air with that warm and ineffable, that uselessly inturning light. |
