The Journey with Jesus: Poems and Prayers
Selected by Dan Clendenin
Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries — roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time's measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay — how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
From Mary Oliver, American Primitive (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.