August Riff

Marissa

A dim thrum of cicadas plays in the background. My once lush garden has become leggy, leaves brown in spots. Most years the grass is burned but this year we’ve had more rain. Still, the yards are not plush green.

My thought: the season’s unraveling. The Anglo-Saxons called August Weod-monath (weed month) because vegetation grows out of hand. My yard too. I’m about to give up trying.

In the afternoon the sun seems low, the shadows long. There’s a hint of aging, a waning of the season. We used to call August the ‘dog days’ hot and dry. Dogs sleep in the shade keeping cool. Everywhere a ‘tiredness’ abounds. There’s no energy in August.

So the mind flies away to next year’s garden: hostas to divide, a few perennials to plant for next year. Late bloomers, so this time will be filled with its own flowers

AND

the coming of Autumn! A wisp of longing. There’s a beauty in it. A fresh smell of wet leaves and color that’s alert and bright.

“Whilst August yet wears her golden crown,
Ripening fields lush- bright with promise;
Summer waxes long, then wanes, quietly passing
Her fading green glory on to riotous Autumn.”
- Michelle L. Thieme, August’s Crown

August is a difficult month to center oneself. It’s a month of ‘mixed’ losses and blessings. And of preparation. TS Eliot may have said ‘April is the cruellest month‘

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But August is the most poignant. Children return to school. Soon school buses will move through darkness. At the same time that farmers prepare the harvest. Tomatoes everywhere. And apples, and hay. But the Hosta’s are giving up the ghost.

I’ll leave you with a Jane Kenyon poem, “Twilight: After Haying”

“Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed–
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
–sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen. . .the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.”