Samhain Curiosities

The world winds round its firm procession
Gripped by gravity, its leather threads unseen but felt
Within the flesh.  We, too, are held to earth
By haunting and murky insights, pathways
Threading through our sessions in the night.
No one, not one escapes this wilderness that sculpts the mind,
Nor can resist stumbling towards a harvest of peace
Through the shadows of constant change,
Nor does not hope to find durable threads
Unraveling from the skeins of time and place
To follow from the monster’s cave into the light.

Do we mind being here in this feast of carnality?
Touching, tasting, exerting, plunging soulward
From blossom to the splendor of red maple leaves,
The golden crowning of the oak, yellow aspens,
The plucked by chill wind and toppled to the ground?
My mind doth so hallow all the Mindedness of nature
Wrought within, worked, conjoined by breath and limb.
Might we also choose to leave, to push off, no longer useful,
Dropping the brilliance of our effervescent, lit display,
A leaf upon the trunk of all creation?
Is it not also in the fullness of the Mind, being creature,
That as nature purposes to undo in the shift of tidings,
We might also, being one of nature’s features?

Why do leaves fall?  Oh, I know (schooled and comprehending), but
Is comprehension just a blister on the skin of sensation?
How do knowing and feeling become relationship:
Flowers and death, cello sonata while letting go,
Awe of beauty and saying goodbye?
What makes it so, first blaring with colors of youth, then aged and gone?

Standing at the mirror,
Who are you?
Underneath, I mean, within,
Where the raven recalibrates your bones
So  you can take its shape and shift and fly.

How the sturdy flush of growth turns brittle.
This autumnal shattering of limbs
Presses me trembling, naked into the cold mud.
Why is it so?  Where have the dreams gone;
Where did this preternatural Thisness come from; and
Is this also dreaming:
Drifting listlessly on the northern wind
Towards piles of leaves and rotting mold?
Merry joys of spring
Are flung into the leather weir of death.
This is that weaving eager for the earth,
Hungry for burial,
Learning contentment by acceptance,
Weaving our threads into dark roots.

I am old now but nonetheless whisper the moon to glow
On and on after my descendants have joined me,
Themselves having fallen into the making of soil.
The earth rocks back and forth
Along its humming, seasonal lullabies
Within the vast embrace of darkness.

Copyright © 2013 James Lawer