Fall	The Late Days September

Another summer is saying good bye. The golden asters, last colorful blooms of the season, waved it to me along the roadside near my house two weeks ago, and now heads of white snakeroot, wild progenitor of the gardener's and florist's domesticated ageratum, have taken the asters' place, their small florets gathered into panicles like so many miniature powder puffs, suggesting to the responsive eye a foretaste of the winter snow that will lie in the colder, darker months ahead where they once grew. My mind turns reluctantly with these changes, the body often lagging behind. Am I ready this fall for the colorful blaze of glory that will inevitably sink, withered and forgotten, into the cold, receiving earth? Hearing a few sadder notes in the late calls of birds now, I accept the changes, but with less readiness than that of former years.

My mind's eye would dally forever at the edge of summer, if it could. Just as it would freeze it in joyous equipoise of beauty and wonder, celebrating "whatever is begotten, born or dies", and with the artifice of that mechanical bird, would fix "upon a golden bough to sing to lords and ladies of Byzantium of what past, or passing, or to come."

We think of what has been most worthwhile in our lives. These are the thoughts of some old men who have become ever more conscious of their mortality. I would, therefore, live at the edge of summer in my mind's eye for the promise that its sunshine gives to beauty and art, for the inspiration and renewal of its varied creations, and for the brightness and vigor it lends to memory in my darkening years. Whether one knows it or not, these are the only untarnished things we get from the sorrow of the world.

I write to give shape to my anxiety and scope to the nature of events that befalls us all. I find I must converse about this mystifying situation in which we are involved. But who listens and thoughtfully responds? The daily world with its horrendous happenings, pain and confusion seems to communicate around, over, under or through itself, never with itself. Everyone talks, but few listen. Ever present greed, lust and the will to power leave little room for the survival of rational thought and beauty. So agree the reflecting old of every age. I write to clear the murky air of the age I live in, and as puny as my efforts are, I try to make language clarify my thoughts about the world, to make it responsive to my moods and concerns, and to purge through its magic as much as possible my fears and uncertainties. In a lonely world, writing is a way of talking to one's self, a monologue of fingers, posing thoughts, direct or implied, in which other fingers, seeking a way to touch, may probe. Writing, it would appear, consists of the tracks the fingers, ours and others, leave behind. My few tracks will soon disappear, I fear, into the black desert of eternity. Be that as it may, putting them down is all that has mattered to me.

I started with the farewells of flowers and some deeper farewells, not expressed except in mood that pass through my thoughts on this particular month; how they recall summer and memory, and, ultimately, art; and how the latter is, to me, the only lasting good in life. I close with the discovery of a high bush clover standing belatedly on the edge of the road, its seed pods empty and its departed seeds caught up in some unseen cycle of eternal growth and renewal, the only lasting things the clover bush possessed. This, its forlorn condition seemed to say, is how I give my art to the world. I pause for a moment and chastened, return to my house.