chrisberkswork

Autumn's Gold

and Brown

 

Lorna Cheriton

 

Poems of Life's

Fall Season

 

 

 

 

 

 

by the same author

Journey to a Far Land

Journey through Darkness

Journey around the Sun

Autumn's Gold and Brown

Poems of my Green Guitar

 

 

for Hamilton Topping

 

 

If a life can be a year, twelve months,

I am in October,

when leaves turn brown and wither,

hair loses color, turns to grey;

 

Strawberries are long gone

and peaches disappear,

 

But apples ripen,

maples blaze with flame,

the autumn sky is azure,

April’s angst long past.

 

 

 

© LORNA CHERITON 2020

 

Musak Life............................................................ 4

Managing Graceful Transitions...................... 6

Aging...................................................................... 7

Kind of Sad......................................................... 8

Anniversary ......................................................... 9

Walking Through Generations..................... 10

Skiing with Grandchildren............................. 11

Across the Gulf................................................ 12

Damaged Dragonfly........................................ 13

The Stern and Distant Father....................... 14

My Mother's Jewelry Box............................... 16

My Mother's Life in her Address Book..... 17

Testing my Mother's Pacemaker.................. 18

The “Bad Man” Coming................................ 20

The Last Words................................................ 21

After my Mother Died.................................... 22

Ash Wednesday................................................. 23

After Half a Century....................................... 24

At a Distant Cousin's Funeral....................... 26

Dancing towards my Elder Self.................... 27

Initiation............................................................. 28

The Poet T’ao Ch’ien...................................... 30

You say the Butterflies have all gone.......... 32

The Autumn of My Life................................ 33

Opening and Closing Scenes........................ 34

On the Death of the Poet Mary Oliver..... 35

The Abyss Ahead............................................. 36

Musak Life

 

 

Everything was huge

when I was a child;

forced to clean the cat’s litter box

or sort rotten carrots in the cellar,

I was Cinderella

abused by a wicked stepmother.

 

Traveling with Grandma,

she let me

eat pie for breakfast.

 

Everything mattered so much

in my teens --

my hero worship

and longing.

 

Casting abroad,

my lost soul

climbed into tree branches over surf,

swam at night in phosphorescent seas,

drank champagne while watching sunsets

on Australia’s sacred mountain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Returning, I did not become

a Nobel scientist,

Pulitzer author,

doctor saving lives

or war correspondent

but keep an agenda book

of weeks slipping by,

lists of tasks

and meetings,

voicing my mother’s words

“That worked out well”

as if life were a project to manage.

 

I fear I will slip

into an old age

of muted colors

and muzak,

no Gibson guitars,

trumpets,

clashing cymbals,

keeping myself from the delirium of rage,

the intensity of grief,

the giddiness of joy.

 

Managing Graceful Transitions

 

          Graceful transitions

          need not be managed,

          just the ungraceful ones,

          like aging,

          when skin wrinkles,

          minds and muscles weaken.

           

          With age should come enrichment

          not merely letting go

          of perching on branches

          in the cherry tree,

          splashing through puddles

          in the rain.

           

          How to change --

          from child and adolescent,

          bypass the adult I never was,

          avoid becoming hag or witch,

          old woman, crone --

          become a wise woman

          resplendent in experience.

 

Aging

 

 

When something fails

within my knee,

how quickly legs,

that took me over trails,

collapse so full of pain,

force me to stop.

 

Someone takes my arm

as if I’m old,

not seeing

I’ve always been the strong one,

helping the elderly.

 

Is this a foretaste of aging

or the real thing?

 

        Kind of Sad

 

 

Kind of sad to find my skin betray me,

softly folding into crepe;

I grow old from outside in

though inside raw

with still-unfinished

childhood.

 

I am still the stumbling toddler,

wanting to be wrapped

in my mother’s arms.

 

I am still the child

yearning to be an artist,

sidetracked into academics,

by Latin’s orderly grammar

and mathematics’ logic.

 

My skin no longer heals its bruises,

but wounds of adolescence

lie buried under scars,

life’s secret hidden in my bones.

           

         

         

Anniversary

 

 

In the November forest

I see leaves brown and rust,

like the colors I wear

in the November of my life.

  

Not an evergreen,

my branch will end,

childless,

when dead leaves fall

as fell my mother’s life

in November.

 

 

Walking Through Generations

 

 

Walking the grandkids’ dog

on streets of wealth,
I recall my mother's love of walks --
evening strolls to see what’s changed

in neighbors' homes and gardens.

Her mother-daughter talk with me
flowed with the gardens that we passed.

 

But these houses loom
larger than where she raised her kids;
new construction makes them larger yet,
sprouting wings of brick and shingle
that mimic yet distort old homes.

I struggle with my grandkids' move
to larger bodies, a larger house,
faster internet, smarter phones,
and fast, low-volume teenage chatter,
giggling while I stand, smiling 
and confused, like my grandmother stood

amongst my raucous siblings long ago.

Skiing with Grandchildren

 

 

Skiing downhill with grandchildren

whom I used to protect, 
my hands ready to catch the boy 
climbing on the banister.

Now they ski into glades
and whip around evergreens;

I don't follow, 
fearing to fall or hit a tree.

Their giddy laughter

echoes ours of long ago,
when everything was cause for hilarity

among my siblings,
especially our invulnerability.

 

 

Across the Gulf

 

 

Every summer I take to camp

activities to entertain our grandchildren --

tie dye and t-shirts to batik,

wax and colors to make candles,

beads and wire for jewelry.

 

Becoming adolescent now,

the kids ignore my invitation

to jump on bubble wrap I brought.

 

I jump on it myself

and pop the bubbles.

 

“Having fun?”  the grandson asks

from across the gulf

where he has jumped from childhood.

 

 

Damaged Dragonfly

 

 

Sweeping the floor

before we leave the cottage,

I find a damaged dragonfly,

dead, I assume

until I touch it

and it waves feeble legs;

I carry it to the end of the pier,

drop it into the pond

to reincarnate as fish;

 

Some day my legs will crumple:

Who will carry me?

What will I become?

 

The Stern and Distant Father

 

 

Slumped on the floor beside his bed,
my father, fallen to the floor,

ankles too weak to hold him
let him down
to where we bend.

The nurse shows me
how to put my arm under his,
closer than dancing.

On count of three, we strain to lift
his aged body,
this tiny nurse from India
and I, once his infant daughter,
together spread his remaining self

half on, half off the bed,
free the sheets,

roll his body, 
tuck him in to sleep.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I recall he lifted me
under my arms
to throw me in the lake

and make me swim, 
that stern and distant father,
now grown old and sometimes softer
by near a century's living.

 

Reaching across the gulf,
I touch his arms again,
erasing our vintage strife
before he goes
where I must someday follow.

 

My Mother's Jewelry Box

 

 

My mother gives me halves of a coin

broken so long ago

each on a chain --

her father wore his through the war,

his bride-to-be kept hers at home

in England through the First World War;

they vowed to join their hearts to whole.

 

She adds a coin her toddler hand picked out

from campfire coals when she was two;

her father soldered it to make a brooch.

 

She adds the locket with a portrait,

a high-school boyfriend killed in war

whose name my brother bears.

 

She adds my father's Christopher,

the saint of travelers, like my dad

who sailed across the ocean,

brought her his saint

and knew his voyage done.

 

These treasures fit the hollow of my hand

yet dwarf the jewelry box I fill with bling.

My Mother's Life in her Address Book

 

 

Within worn leather binding,
old roommates' names writ large
in her flowing youthful script,
their addresses crossed out

and new ones written in
as friends got married,

moved away.

Her husband's family added --

in-laws, nieces, nephews,

then her own chicks fledging,

landing briefly,

flying on to adulthood.

 

Grandchildren’s addresses,

writ over those of long-gone friends,

in smaller, shaky script.

 

 

Testing my Mother's Pacemaker

 

 

Electrode-equipped large magnet –

a metal donut

to place on patient's heart

and connect to telephone --

the package avoids a trip to clinic;

it tests at home

an old and failing heart.

 

I take the magnet in my hand

and seek below her blouse

the round plateau beneath the skin,

my mother's monitor.

 

Her skin like paper, so fragile thin;

eyes dart with life I know will leave

though cannot know how soon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We share a laugh, a memory;

I see her old, frailer than her mother

ever was to me.

 

I hold her bony body

and wrap my arms around

as she held me so long ago;

I see a future with her gone

but then our never knowing comes to mind

I could be gone before.

 

The “Bad Man” Coming

 

 

My mother is frail,

age saps her strength,

slows her step,

stiffens her muscles;

her anxiety escalates,

telling nurses not to leave the room:

a bad man will get them.

 

She sees his invisible presence --

he sucked out her flesh,

shriveled her breasts

from childbearing ripeness

to hardened nuts,

sucking out the life force --

the same bad man that took her mother

and will take me.

 

The Last Words

 

 

“She is much worse” they say

“no longer eats or drinks

or leaves her bed.”

 

Decades ago her cancer

convinced me I had fully fledged,

for she had launched me well,

her child,

and I’d withstand her death.

 

But now, with years of growing close

like sisters,

impending loss

swirls me with vertigo:

though other people's mothers die,

I cannot imagine life

without mine,

that I might never hear

her voice again.

 

I phone across the continent

to ask the phone be held to her,

so I can say the things I’ve held

and have no need of her response.

After my Mother Died

 

 

Towards the end, her body shrank,
mere shadow of her former self.

I feel her essence was refined
by suffering as the end drew near,
until she breathed her last

and when she left,

her spirit entered mine.

So, all the grief before she died
is lifted now.  I feel her eyes
look out from mine.

 

May her bright spirit open me,
not in denial of what I lost
but celebrating what she left in me.

 

Ash Wednesday

 

 

These ashes, living fronds

of palms reaching skyward,

cut down and burned at Pentecost,

now black and grey,

fit in the hollow

of our pastor’s palm.

 

On our foreheads,

her fingers form the dusty cross;

her voice forms words,

“Remember that you are dust

and to dust you will return.”

 

How can it be that I am dust,

my living flesh, my questing mind?

as my mother’s body now is ash

within the urn

that rests beside my father

waiting.

 

 

After Half a Century

 

 

I fly across the country,
drive across the city
to where my childhood home
stands starkly

and knock at next door neighbor's.

 

My friend's mother
now in her nineties,
her once dark hair now thin and pale,
lives within the dark wood panels
where we children played our forty-fives.

 

Each mother, if she didn't hear

the blasting from her basement,
knew where to find her child;
each said the next-door respite
from teenage music
saved her sanity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

People said her son
would marry me,
the girl next door.

she shows me photos of him now,
our separate lives
knotted with marriages and careers
not dreamt of then.

 

Our neighbor from half a century ago
still has dark eyes,
now deep with gratitude for my visit,
seeing my mother alive in me,

 

But when I leave
those eyes are pierced with pain -
we may not ever meet again.

At a Distant Cousin's Funeral

 

 

No one voiced their memories of her;

the funeral director read sad words

concerning God but with no spark

of how she loved her animals and birds.

 

He asked for memories - no one spoke;

brothers, sisters, cousins sat there dumb;

no one knew the one they'd come to honor

none spoke about her past, what she'd become…

of how she loved her creature friends, her pets,

grew up, left home, had lovers and a job      

until called home to nurse an ailing mother

and stayed -- loyal choices but they rob

one's freedom to expand; she got trapped

inside that cluttered house, too much to eat;

her body fattened as her world contracted,

lack of memories underlining her defeat.

Dancing towards my Elder Self

 

 

I go down the waterslide,

do handstands in the pool,

climb up trees to sit on branches…

…and dance, wild with exuberance,

with the twenty-year-olds

(none conceived when I first danced).

 

Suddenly a pain stabs,

my collapsing hip betrays;

I limp from the dance

and from my own youth --

the choice: to give up dancing

or learn to savor slowness.

 

From the periphery,

I take in the whole circle,

spreading my arms to embrace

these wild, defiant selves,

and hold their high-speed,

vibrating lives

in my serene

elder gaze.

 

Initiation

 

 

A party to ski cross-country

under the full moon

began with friends,

dinner and conversation,

music for dancing.

 

Then night skiing on paths,

flares at the crossroads

to reach the pond and bonfire.        

 

Stopping to watch the moon

glide through wind-blown clouds

and silhouette bare-branched trees,

I arrive at the pond

as everyone is leaving.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My skis, precarious on the descent

to the open expanse of ice,

accelerate towards the bonfire,

huge logs aflame

sending billows of smoke,

the fierce wind whipping

legions of sparks

into brief ribbons of incandescence

that fly skyward,

then vanish,

or collapse into ash

at my feet.

 

I need this terrible beauty of destruction,

bodies of trees charred in the inferno,

to see myself,

initiate and shaman,

released into fire

becoming ashes.

 

From this fiery vision,

I return,

see the lodge's light,

beacon to my solitary journey.

 

The Poet T’ao Ch’ien

 

 

Sixteen centuries ago

on the far side of the world,

a government official

withdraws from Chinese bureaucracy

to live as a farmer

in poverty and hardship.

 

He walks beside a stream,

discovers a grove

of blossoming trees

and the spring within,

source of the stream.

 

He writes of homing birds

returning from wandering,

a mountain

cleansed by lingering clouds,

pine and chrysanthemum

"that do not yield

at the first autumn frost."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ancient pictographs of his poems

claim earth and heaven endure forever,

seasons have a circular rhythm,

sun and moon come back around,

but humans leave abruptly,

to return no more --

where I go, no sun will shine.

 

Once a minor bureaucrat,

now in my small boat

amid the water lilies,

a pair of loons sailing nearby,

laurel flowers lit by sun

against dark leaves,

huge roots of a tree toppled by years of erosion,

I find his poems afloat

in my mind,

and ponder the time

when I shall leave abruptly

to return no more

except in the lilies

that I become.

 

You say the Butterflies have all gone

 

 

This warm October evening,

I find orange and black glory

landing on the purple asters --

a monarch opening and closing

its glorious wings,

lifting off one flower

to land on another.

 

In the morning,

after the night’s hard frost,

the dahlias are frozen black;

fragile monarch,

rebel against the season,

flown,

yet fluttering forever

in my mind.

 

The Autumn of My Life

 

 

I grew so many shoots
in my springtime --
a budding artist,  
making pictures they admired
and a clown,
saying things to make them laugh.

 

Now, in autumn, late day sun
lights up the golden leaves
and briefly flames the red;
time moves quickly
like fall's swift passing;
leaves flutter down as does
my memory and my strength.

 

November, barren,
with leaves down,
lets me see further
through the forest.

 

 

 

Opening and Closing Scenes

 

 

A film might open with this scene --

a cloud of fog obscures the world,

the morning mist still hides the lake

till sunrise lights the distant shore

and trees emerge beyond the haze

that thins, revealing hills and lake;

the plot begins, as did my life.

 

But evening ghosts the water's edge,

makes trees begin to fade in fog;

sunset fades as darkness comes,

like consciousness might fade away

when eyelids close to end my life.

On the Death of the Poet Mary Oliver

 

 

Watching the grasshopper’s jaws

eat sugar

inspired her poem

The Summer’s Day.

 

Truly a spiritual agnostic,

she asked what each of us will do

with our “one wild and precious life."

 

Now she has gone

to what awaits us all,

her atoms mingling with the universe.

 

The Abyss Ahead

 

 

The forest and the path

grow dim with dusk;                                

rain greys the sky

behind black silhouettes of branches.

 

Night holds sleep,

consciousness gone,

like end of life,

the dark chasm.

 

Or perhaps,

as those near death

see light and peace,

ahead there lies the bright abyss...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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