Beneath a starry sky, amid a cacophony of crickets and the clicking of katydids, I swim to the end of August and the start of September. The branches of the seven sons’ flower tree are filled with their late-season blooms – small and unassuming, but packing a potently perfumed punch. On these muggy nights, the pool water has remained warm, a quasi-amniotic fluid in which I float, looking up at the light blanket of clouds, re-born at the end of summer, and trying valiantly to hang on, to hold tight to a season that must soon end. The last full month of summer has gone. September is not coming soon – it’s already here. And so, a poem, for knowing when to let go:
In Blackwater Woods
By Mary Oliver
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Back to Blog
