Autumn
1
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story
by Chekhov or my father
2
What is sometimes called a
tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning
is only the long
red and orange branch of
a green maple
in early September reaching
into the greenest field
out of the green woods at the
edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered tired
of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer re-
minding everyone (in
our family) of a Russian
song a story by
Chekhov or my father on
his own lawn standing
beside his own wood in
the United States of
America saying (in Russian)
this birch is a lovely
tree but among the others
somehow superficial
Notes
Where John Keats lingered in the patient, golden stillness of late summer, Grace Paley tracks the year’s turn through an exact, formal repetition, i.e., a single maple branch reaching out like a burning arm, replaying its image twice across stanzas only to crack open into an exile’s delayed memory. The speaking subject demonstrates how a landscape is never purely its present soil, showing how the tattered birches of an American lawn inevitably call up a Chekhov story, a Russian song, and the voice of a displaced father judging foreign trees in his native tongue. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the layered cadence of diaspora and memory, reminding us that repetition is never mere return, it is the old country speaking through the new woods, returning altered, tender, and quietly estranged. #September #GracePale #autumn #fall #Poetry