Moving & Poetry

The Fall Equinox is tomorrow, I'm moving, and I still love Robert Frost <3

I’m sitting on the floor in the living room of my new apartment. It’s the first day that really feels like fall, and the light is golden and fading fast. None of my furniture is here yet, which means the hardwood floors are on full display, twinkling like childhood. Not to cover them, but to make it more like childhood, I’ll buy an oriental rug and a big rectangular dining table.

From where I’m sitting, I have a funny view out the window to my left. Two or three buildings tall enough to see, One naked water tower, one encased in brick with pretty arches and pointed roof. It looks a bit like it’s meant to house a princess. The Water Tower Princess of New York City. Two satellite dishes and a red chimney poke up in the foreground. The nice thing about a sixth floor walkup in this neighborhood is that most of the buildings are only five stories high.

I’ll try not to bore you with too much logistical musing other than to say—I know it’s a real luxury to have access to the new place before I absolutely must be out of the old one. It is, but it also feels like limbo.

I am nostalgic already, but I’m also impatient—filled with an eagerness to just get it done. Change in general, but particularly the change that accompanies moving from one dwelling to another, sends me into a state of…well, I’m not actually sure what the state is. Other than uncomfortable to a point of misery. I’m exhausted by the whole thing before it even begins.

It’s partly because I like control and knowing what to expect. That’s baseline. It’s also partly because I’m a stuff person. I’m not light as a feather or free as the birds all those feathers are presumably coming from. I’m weighed down by my loving detritus and personal ephemera. This weight is pleasant, joyful even, in every situation except for the ones where I have to move it all from one place to another.

Maybe it’s something deeper though. Though humans started as migratory creatures, we haven’t been that way for a long time. I never read Sapiens so I don’t know if that’s even an accurate statement, but it feels right. Surely some people are still wanderers, but mostly now, we put down roots. If I am anything, it is a putter down of roots. This quality makes up a large part of my self-image. It is also a defining factor of my femininity. A woman is a tree with many roots, or in my imagination thanks to Robert Frost, a silken tent with many ties.

To move is to rip up my own roots, to unstake my own tent. That this major change in my life is set against the backdrop of our most notable seasonal change is not lost on me. I will not say “a new season for my new season,” because I do not want it to be a new season. I want every single thing in my life to stay the same except for this one thing. Maybe that’s why this move feels particularly unsettling. How can I be excited for my new chapter when I don’t want a new chapter? I guess in some books, the author starts a new chapter and the action just picks up right where it left off. That sounds okay.

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The Fall Equinox is on Saturday, so I’ve been reading, as is my custom, a lot of poetry. I have been poking around in collected works and reading Ada Limon (more on that at some indeterminate point in the future). I’ve been perusing on Instagram and even on Pinterest. Even though all I look at is bookshelf inspiration, it somehow knows that I’ll want the poetry too. I realize in typing that out, it’s not really a far jump. Aside from all that though, I’m back to my Every Man’s Library, Four Seasons anthology, diving headfirst into the fall—sorry “Autumn”—section.

Seasonally speaking, but also possibly generally speaking, across the board, poems about fall are the best poems there are. They don’t get any better. These are poems about lovers, children, old men, neighbors, dogs, bounty, harvest, barrenness, resentment, nervousness, fear, awe, wonder, admiration. And it all goes in a circle like that—from joy to sorrow to nostalgia to hope.

One morning this week, sitting in dappled sunlight on a bench in Washington Square Park before work, I shivered as I read Emily Dickinson’s “Summer Begins to Have the Look.” Summer does begin to have the look! I felt like Dickinson was talking about me—the “Peruser of enchanting Book,” suddenly looking up, and unwillingly realizing that the fall is gaining on the leaves. Her image of clouds wrapped in silks and hills in thickening shawls, and taking that as the sign of impending fall much like seasonal changes can be noted in the clothes we wear. It’s delightful!

It was these lines that really caught me though: “The eye begins its avarice / A meditation chastens speech / Some Dyer of a distant tree / Resumes his gaudy industry.” My eyes are feeling greedy—greedily taking in the last days of green and the evening light. There is a sense of silence—a fear of speaking and speeding things along, however irrational that may be. I love to picture a man in overalls somewhere up in Maine or Vermont dyeing each leaf of each tree, slowly making his way down to New York. Dickinson leaves us contemplating the perennial nature of life—all things must come to an end, but many things come back again.

Then Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Autumn Chant” appeared and made me smile, like some long lost nursery rhyme. The old fashioned ones that are always ultimately about death, but still maintain their cheer. She describes scenes of autumn: ladders in the fruit trees, and leafy trellises slowly turning from green to orange. It is in this creeping change that bright young things, dusty pink roses, come face to face with their own impermanence and mortality. As Edna says, “And the rose remembers / The dust from which it came.”

How baffling the paradoxical brightness of these colors seems—though they signify death, while the colors they replace were life embodied. There need not be confusion though, “Beauty never slumbers; / All is in her name; / But the rose remembers / The dust from which it came.” With that repeated refrain, the rose and the reader must acknowledge not only their own mortality, but also the fact that the eventual death they face is a part of (not apart from) nature’s beauty.

Sitting there still, I flipped to “Unharvested,” by yes, my favorite, Robert Frost. Surprisingly, his only autumn poem included in this anthology, though there are so many to choose from. I’d read this one before but not for some time, and all I could remember were the apples. The apple tree by the side of the road that has dropped its harvest. The ripe smell, and the red circle. The reference to Eden even struck me familiar—“For there had been an apple fall / As complete as the apple had give man.” How much is packed into those two lines? The fall as tragedy, or the fall as a gift? I know where Frost weighs in.

It is what comes next that I hadn’t remembered from previous readings. “May something go always unharvested!” with the exclamation point and all. It astounded me, and made me want to scream. No one knows how to use an exclamation point like Robert Frost. My heart jumped up to my throat and tears to my eyes when I read that line, that plea. “May much stay out of our stated plan, / Apples or something forgotten and left, / So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.” The best things are the things unplanned. In the big red circle of life, nothing happens in isolation. One man’s lost and forgotten harvest is another man’s treasure. That’s what they say right?

“May much stay out of our stated plan.” I think that’s all for today.

xx

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