October light

Eugenio Montale: “Bring me the sunflower crazed with light.”

Today’s Poem; Eugenio Montale “Bring me the Sunflower” ends with the line above. It is an image that blazes. It is raining dismally onto the skylight above me, and so it should; we are nearly mid-way into October, the dying time of year.  Where does the light go? The sun falls from the sky like gold flaking off a temple and collects around my feet, blinding me on a gray afternoon.  It is the sun exploding on trees that I kick into piles, and all the oranges and golds of the season’s colours are the falling light of the year.  My English uncle used to laugh at me for calling this season the “Fall”.  He considered it a quaint north Americanism; a kind of distanced ignorance, as if I’d strayed too far from the English of my ancestors.  But it is the fall, this great cascading of light from the sky to the ground; understandable that our European ancestors watched with misgiving as the sun buried itself in the soil, and devised every form of prayer and fire to bring it back.  But let me not get ahead of myself; just now there is the perfect juxtaposition of Payne’s Gray and Cadmium to flame the heart.

Armloads of drifting sun

I was not used to this falling

When I was young, near the equator

The sun never varied, but here it pulls me

With it, as if I must go into the underworld.

Light, life, everything swallowed into darkness

Singing its praises.

It is an Olympic battle, is it not?

 It has devised a creature

Whose heart can flame,

Can light a fire and wait it out