All The Time in The World

Oct 17 2015

It was the sound that struck me

as I crunched over the lawn

thick with fall;

the sound of autumn

I almost forgot.

Because we take in the world through our eyes,

the brilliant display

of luminous yellow and crimson and flame,

swirling windrows

piles raggedly raked.

Except that here

in this nordic landscape, with its dour folk

the leaves are modest, restrained;

mousy yellow, and burnt toast

a listing freighter’s

rust-stained hull.

Yes, a few are fire-engine red;

but we find these suspect

too full of themselves.

But the sound is still crisp,

a thick blanket

still cushions my steps.

Reminding me

how fall follows fall

no matter how forgetful I am.

How the planet circles

and the seasons turn,

the cycles of life

recur and recur.

Which both reassures, and taunts us

as we measure out time

from birth, to bloom, to death,

our small linear lives

that briefly intersect

these great eternal spheres.

As we forge blindly ahead,

believe in progress

and take the quickest route there.

A fine illusion

in a universe that circles back, begins again

predictable as clock-work.

Unrushed, and unafraid,

and majestically indifferent to us.

Another fall, the leaves have changed.

If only we knew

that there was all the time in the world.

That the year

will endlessly replay.

That this harvest of leaves

is as good as eternal.

There are a couple of things going on here.

One is the contrast between the central conceit of modernity and an older and more primordial way of thinking. Modernity confidently assumes that life improves; that history is linear and progressive, marching inexorably into a better future. While ancient wisdom has it that we are relatively powerless and subject to fate, and that human life is as cyclic as the natural world. In this worldview, people don't move from where they were born, the future is the same as the past, and there is nothing unusual about communing with your dead ancestors. (After all, if past present and future are all contemporaneous, then the dead are still with us. As we too will be present, after death.) So there is a linear worldview, that seems rushed and urgent. And then there is a more cyclic view, that seems fatalistic and measured. (I think you could also put this in terms of east/west as much as ancient/modern: Eastern philosophies tend to embrace this cyclic and fatalistic worldview much more than ours.)

The other is simply an attempt to write in a fresh way about autumn leaves, which have pretty much been written to death. And also an attempt to deal with the bittersweet sense of time's headlong passage; which may be something I've pretty much written to death!

I think the narrator here is very much the poet. He is observing closely. He is focusing on microcosm; but using it to illuminate the big picture. He is stepping back from the urgency and immediacy of life to take time out, to be in the moment, to cultivate a more philosophical and less solipsistic perspective.

I'm pleased with the last line, which I think really nails this. In as good as eternal, the poem achieves a sudden calm: the phrase implies that you can fear mortality and pine for a thousand more autumns; or you can fully immerse yourself in this one, and in so doing experience them all right now. So in this final line, the narrator detaches from the future and invests fully in the moment; the future and present co-exist. (Which is very Zen: the philosophy of freeing yourself from attachment and desire; and also of being in the moment, centred and surrendered. And which is one example of why I said it could be as much an east/west distinction as an ancient/modern one.)

These are the hardest poems to write, and still keep readable. Because poems that touch on complicated philosophical issues can so easily get wordy, pretentious, boring. This stuff is so much easier to write about in prose, where you can write in a direct, comprehensive, and sequential way. So I hope there is enough here to not only keep a reader engaged, but reward her for making the effort. In general, I probably don't give my reader nearly enough credit, don't trust her enough. It's as if the hypothetical reader I have in mind is distracted and uncommitted. So I always try to make it easy, accessible. I write almost as if trying to seduce her, dangling some shiny metaphor or clever analogy right up front! Maybe this time, then, I'm doing well by asking a little more of her.