friday refrains · two for autumn
Friday 31 October 2008 | I like a cookie
From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine
III.
I kissed a flame, what did I expect.
Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold:
one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk
through that wall of molten glass.
And purification
could be conceived, if not
attained, only after many years,
in autumn, in a fire greater than yours,
though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold
and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh
taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew
the object of this exercise, except
having, inadvertently, each of us, burned
we recognized the smell
of wood smoke, the slow swirl
flakes of wood ash make in heavy air;
and we were ready, each in a private way, to make
the gifts the season required.
Mine was the scene
of my young self in your arms,
eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort
to give each other away—when I glimpsed
behind your pleasure, fear; behind
fear, anger; and knew
in a bolt some gifts
conceal a greater gift.
I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back
into darker flame
in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed,
and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash.
And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand.
How much that is human will never burn.
•
An Autumn Song
Nou skrinkeþ rose ant lylie-flour
þat whilen ber þat suete sauour
in somer, þat suete tyde;
ne is no quene so stark ne stour
ne no leuedy so bryht in bour
at ded ne shal by glyde.
Whose wol fleysh lust forgon
and heuene blis abyde,
on Iesu be is þoht anon,
at þerled was ys side.
(from The Harley Lyrics, ca. 1325)
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