memory

notes from underground

Sedum autumn joy: unearthed during fall clean-up.

wood house

Visitor

I am dreaming of a house just like this one
but larger and opener to the trees, nighter
than day and higher than noon, and you,
visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy
milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.
For each night is a long drink in a short glass.
A drink of blacksound water, such a rush
and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.
And if it isn't night yet, though I seem to
recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.
Did you receive my invitation? It is not
for everyone. Please come to my house
lit by leaf light. It's like a book with bright


pages filled with flocks and glens and groves
and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr
in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that
took too long to read but minutes to unread -
that is - to forget. Strange are the pages
thus. Nothing but the hope of company.
I made too much pie in expectation. I was
hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a
nightgown in a real way. Did you receive
my invitation? Written in haste, before
leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.
An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill
or arrive but moves silently in a direction.
Like a dark book in a long life with a vague
hope in a wood house with an open door.

~ Brenda Shaughnessy
Source: Poetry (September 2011)

orange pop

Autumn flowering Crocus speciosus.
So beautiful, so full of life, so sasha.

I'm your: "Here-I-Am"

"Don't waste me, 'cause I won't last long,
and I won't come back, I won't come back - "

~Diane Cluck, I'm Yr Here-I-Am

letting go

After a rainstorm.

pale beauty

Hydrangea paniculata in soft morning light

autumn moon garden

"Look down: a river of grass. Look up: a velvet lost
and found. Look inside: no straws to drink that dusk."

from Backyard Georgics, by Lance Larsen
Source: Poetry (November 2010)

through old glass

Turning leaves viewed through circa 1915 vintage window glass.

blue notes No. 1

anemone Honorine Jobert

I am drawn to the ethereal quality and off-center energy of this photograph. An archetype, the garden and the gardener, moving toward the light?

the mind's eye

Converging images from separate events, seen 2 weeks ago in NYC.
1) Photograph by John Dugdale (Rubin Museum, John Dugdale and Oliver Sacks, Talk About Nothing)
2) Painting by Joan Miro (Metropolitan Museum of Art, Miro's Dutch Interiors)

autumnal No. 1

Kale in the fall garden

"It takes a calender one damp day to declare fall,
weeks of dying mums to second the motion."

from Backyard Georgics, by Lance Larsen
Source: Poetry (November 2010)

autumn vase

seeing through a new lens
the arc of the daffodil

"So dawn goes down to day

Nothing gold can stay" ~ Robert Frost

first frost

A clematis in bloom, discovered today while cutting back the frost-bitten dahlias.

backyard

"Even if something is left undone, everyone must take time to sit still and watch the leaves turn." ~ Elizabeth Lawrence

autumn rain

Dahlia 'Eternal Snow'

House windows flutter quietly in the day - now more, now less - and breathe deep the garden air, still warm with the radiance of summer ... a dahlia blossom, made heavy by the rain, nods on a bent stem and finds its way into my kitchen ... this is autumn. - MMW

fallen rose

Found among the leaves this morning.

climbing rose

As viewed from the dining room, while repairing an old window ...

maple tree

This magnificent old maple tree has died. I wasn't aware until I got a notice from the borough. I think back to last summer and that one morning with the red-headed woodpecker ... first time I'd seen one in that tree ... now I realize what it meant.

windflower

A hearty (and yet dainty) perennial