In Blackwater Woods
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
Notes
Where Wisława Szymborska suspended the falling victims of history in the static amber of a photograph, Mary Oliver walks into the cold drift of autumn smoke to watch the trees turn to orange flame, confronting the seasonal imperative that all cherished forms must eventually surrender their mass to the dark earth. The speaking subject transforms grief into an embodied philosophical discipline, showing that consciousness cannot shield itself from temporal decay through rigid resistance, but must learn to hold the fragile, mortal object directly against the bones before letting it dissolve back into the silence from which it arose. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the elemental rhythm of release, reminding us that repetition is neither a prison nor a ghost, but the sacred cadence of returning what we love to the indifferent flow of time so the living can continue their solitary stride. #September #MaryOliver #Echo #Time #Life