Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September

It's a lovely community-building exercise, but I think I've already written all I have to say about the BBAW topic for today--a book or genre I tried due to the influence of another blogger. My thoughts about the anxiety of blogging influence are in my May 20 post about book recommendations.

Rest assured that if your blog name is on my sidebar, you've influenced my reading. I started making a list, but anyone who comes here regularly knows that I don't have the soul of a librarian--I hate making lists or cataloging what I've read. Ron just came by and I said to him, "you know, you always instigate our bouts of organizing books" and he agreed, saying "you don't like categorizing them" and then added "if it were up to you, you'd have them all on the shelf by which ones had amusing titles next to each other," which is true, and a game we often play. It started with a story my mother told about finding two books side by side on the shelf at her college library: The Sound and the Fury As I Lay Dying.

Try it right now--go over to a nearby bookshelf and find two books that really ought to be right next to each other. I'm going to do it myself. Okay, I'm back; it took me about two seconds to see that Summerland ought to be next to The Gone-Away World at this time of year.

That makes me think that what I really want to share with you today is another autumn poem, this one by a poet I've just discovered that I love, Todd Davis. Don't let the title put you off; you don't have to know Kinnell's poems to enjoy this one.

Letter to Galway Kinnell at the End of September

I confuse the name for goldenrod with the name for this month,
but what else would we call this time of year--afternoon light
like saffron, blue lake reflecting blue sky? Where we entered,
asters and goldenrod flooded the length of the meadow, field

literally abuzz, swaying with the movement of bees, air
warm enough to draw sweat and the smell of those flowers
and our bodies drifting around us. The part of the sun that rested
the kettle of heat upon the goldenrod's tiny, yellow blossoms

lifted the clearing clean out of the ground, somehow suspending us--
if not in air, then in time--and that's what we want after all.
Not starting over, not being reborn, but borne up like these bees,
or the birds who migrate toward a place of neverending, all of us

unmoored, still part of the earth, but absolved of our obligations to it:
the necessity of growing old, the bald fact that a month from now
all this beauty will crumble--asters black, goldenrod brown,
no more than flower-dust when we rake our hands across their heads.

This is what I want in all things--to have the rules suspended just for me. Don't you?