A soft and gleaming season

 

September already? The hottest, driest summer on record gently draws to a close. 

No wonder so many poignant songs and poems have been written about September. 

When you’re young you prefer the vulgar months, the fullness of the seasons. As you grow older you learn to like the in-between times, the months that can’t make up their minds. Perhaps it’s a way of admitting that things can’t ever bear the same certainty again.

Julian Barnes
From "Flaubert's Parrot"

 Absolute September

How hard it is to take September
straight—not as a harbinger
of something harder.

Merely like suds in the air, cool scent
scrubbed clean of meaning—or innocent
of the cold thing coldly meant.

How hard the heart tugs at the end
of summer, and longs to haul it in
when it flies out of hand

at the prompting of the first mild breeze.
It leaves us by degrees
only, but for one who sees

summer as an absolute,
Pure State of Light and Heat, the height
to which one cannot raise a doubt,

as soon as one leaf's off the tree
no day following can fall free
of the drift of melancholy.

-Mary Jo Salter 

 

 From the late Washington Post garden columnist Henry Mitchell:  

There is no need to think of September as the trash bin of the year, with just scraps of leftover things in the garden, because many things are only coming to perfection at the end of summer--a soft and gleaming season.