September song
Notes on the golden month
Gold is the colour of these waning days, as we navigate the border between summer and fall.
From Helen Hunt Jackson’s poem September: O golden month! How high thy gold is heaped!
Shadows dance languidly across wooden floors in early evening. In fields, stalks stand tall awaiting harvest. As always, I want to hold on to the season (the cicadas, heat, roses) but autumn has arrived; the oak leaves are beginning to rust. I’m reminded of this poem by Mary Chivers, titled Late August:
I ache for what I cannot keep - the birds,
the phlox, the late-flying bees -
though I would not forbid the frost,
even if I could. There will be more to love
and lose in what's to come and this too: desire
to see it clear before it's gone.
August was moonlight on the ocean, summer storms that felt like they would take the roof with them, islands both real and fictional, infinite cups of coffee, bookstores, watching clouds drift over the Rockies and prairies from airplane windows, a maddening spell of poison ivy, sentences sought, pages savoured.
Part of August was spent in a cabin with no electricity, a setting that inspired the novel I’ve been working on, a landscape steeped in lore. Islands are inherently mysterious—what type of people do they attract? What makes them want to stay? In my novel, a young woman is drawn to an island with an arcane past. She expects to hide out there, bide time; she is being monitored, followed. The island presents a fallacy of escape, as if all you can do here is leave / and plunge, never to return, into the depths.1 An island has a way about it, embedding itself in its visitor. It is like a room with no corners.
I think of the deer who caught our attention at dusk, feasting on the clover. Without electricity—the fact of wires coiled inside walls, refrigerator humming, vibrations of the everyday—the world becomes very quiet. My father made a noise and instead of running, the trio of deer froze. After hours of rain the understory was cloaked in a heavy cobalt haze. It felt like something from a dream. Grazing single file, one deer turned back, over its shoulder as though we had bothered them. (Of course, we had.) Across the distance its gaze latched onto mine; a knowing, a warning. Beast, woman. An exchange. I felt a jab of terror. What was that look in its eye, what was it trying to tell me? The moment swelled until its ears flicked, breaking the spell. The deer filed away, the last one taking its time, aware of its potency. An island abides by its own set of rules.
“How did they get here?” I whispered to my father. It felt important to keep my voice down, to not disturb them any further. We could still hear them, quietly making their way through the woods, although minutes had passed and their bodies blended in with the darkness, mute shapes belonging to night.
He described how they would have crossed the chain of islands from the mainland. I tried to picture their hooves hurrying below surface, the threat of whales and sharks beneath them. “It’s a big swim for them. Once they’re here, they don’t want to leave.”
Islands possess that type of power; islands possess.
September has been a blur. The world is suddenly sepia, tinged with post-summer fatigue, or else a renewed sense of purpose. In the ditches as you drive out of the city: asters and goldenrod. In the city, milkweed loosens itself from the pod and drifts easy as snow.
A childhood memory: running to the field behind our house, the warm air of late summer, early autumn on my skin. Crawling into the brush, carving tunnels in the dead stalks, becoming ensnared by their burs and thistles. There was a world within the skeleton of a field that had, weeks earlier, been brimming with green. When you lay down, the field crackled in suspiration, the sound of true silence. If you stayed still long enough, the field mice would begin moving again. I remember breaking the dead weeds in half, the smell of them on my palms. Watching an arrow of geese move across the white sky. A fire burning in the distance. The artist Andrew Wyeth once said he preferred autumn and winter to the warmer seasons—“when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it; the whole story doesn't show."
In spring, I titled a newsletter after Elaine Equi’s poem, Etudes.
Spring is a prelude, she wrote. But autumn is different.
Autumn is a solitude.
Autumn is an aptitude.
Autumn is a gratitude.
Autumn is a semi-nude.
(The complete poem can be read here.)
The end of the summer always arrives as a lesson, a reminder.
There is no sense in tricking myself into believing I can prolong it. Even today as I write this, on the last day of the season, the squirrels have ravaged my tomato plant, biting into all of them, sparing me one. A single carmine globe blushes under the morning sun. I admire it for a moment, all that it represents, until I tug it from the vine. It fits into the cup of my palm, as if to say: Here. One last taste of summer. Enjoy, make the most of it, but it’s time to move on.
As Nikki Giovanni mused, Autumn will come anyway - let us continue our dance beneath the sun:
The autumn equinox arrives on Sunday, September 22nd—light and dark, day and night, the beginning of a new season.
All that blooms must fall, Marilyn Chin reminds us in her poem Autumn Leaves, though the sunflowers continue to lean over passersby, eavesdropping on conversation. What will they do with our words once their heads are severed, seeds devoured by crows? I empathize with Karina Borowicz, who describes the claws of tiny yellow blossoms of her tomato plants:
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
Despite the sunshine and heat, signs of change emerge: the maples have begun to copper, the salmon will soon appear in the rivers, tiresome travellers urging themselves against the current. The breeze and sunlight feel different, softer. In The House by the Sea, May Sarton noted that “autumn light is beginning, the sea that dark blue… the air like champagne.” I love that—air like champagne.
The Rose of Sharon have dropped their purple heads, their litter like candy wrappers on the lawn of the cemetery where I stumble over uneven ground to water the marigolds planted at my grandparents’ grave. Within weeks, leaves from the honey locust will shiver off in the breeze. The sumac, already glaring like a torch, catches my eye whenever I pass it. Autumn is my season, dear, wrote Virginia Woolf in a 1907 letter to Violet Dickinson. It is, after all, the season of the soul.
Earlier this week, a partial lunar eclipse, shadow slowly creeping across the moon. That’s what autumn is—a swallowing, a submersion. Mercy to the elements. As I walked down the street on Tuesday night, I noticed another woman, silent, her attention fixed on the full moon. She wasn’t with anyone, wasn’t looking at her phone. Moon sister, I thought. A secret kinship, an invisible thread.
Consider the duality of these days, a balancing of the scales—here in Toronto, the sun rises at seven in the morning, sets at seven-fifteen in the evening. In summer, hearts beat slow, a kick petal in a slow-slam, a fish flopping on pavement. Autumn marks a change of pace, an uptick in tempo. Come September, come autumn, we are celeritous—meeting people, going places, chasing the sun. Day and night, green and gold in equal measure. At the threshold of each season, you will always find a doorway. It was Rilke who said, “It almost seems as if autumn were the true creator, more creative than the spring.” The light is waning, the flowers dying, yes. But autumn is here; the door is open.
Wisława Szymborska, from her poem ‘Utopia’
I cannot tell you how eagerly I’m waiting on your novel.