From a "Day in Autumn" by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
The poem in its entirety here. Annie Finch considers the poetry of fall, quoting Frost's “After Apple-Picking”:
I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.This paradox, I think, is the pith of autumn, the part that some of us just can’t get enough of, the reason autumn is so many people’s favorite season. This is the ineffable puzzle that inspires Stevens’s “gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights” and leads Archibald MacLeish to call autumn “the human season.” This is the time when, perhaps, we are all looking to feel more accurately what Mary Kinzie, in her commentary on Rilke’s “Day in Autumn,” described as “the flowering of loss, . . . the ripening of diminishment into husk and hull.” And in this, autumn is again like poetry: though it may help us to notice more deeply how we are alone, it can also help us to feel the excitement of sharing that solitude with each other.
(Photo by Flickr user Moonjazz)
The Dish 