Seasons for all themselves don’t mean
What they once did. I’ve not grown
Out of them, rather more into and a part
Of them with a deepening I’ve not had.
Not to be dramatic, only matter of fact.
A time when each season meant differences
In things needing to be done is done for me.
Those needings now need to be hired out
To those whose labor is not tenuous
But filled with stamina and a resilience
More nimble than my unsteady willingness
To mount a ladder and repair a rotted soffit.
I am not enfeebled by a long way yet. It’s just
My work’s more now a tooled thought inside.
I.
Autumn is my season of perfect cadences.
In it the heart and mind are at peace.
The slender line of equinox orchestrates
In harmony circumspect participation
Of the four elements that make us part of
An earth fully aware the year is growing late.
Each day a ballet full of import in the air.
Walking, my feet in step with my breathing.
The feel of the first chill-quicken’d bite
In my lungs, holds my concentration close
To what matters. – The wideness of the sky,
The attitudes of clouds, the ‘V’ of flocks flowing
Rather than just in flight, how trees enflamed
Allow a lone evergreen among them to be seen,
The moment, at sunset, when the countryside
Gives the day over to night in sighs
And all the secret names of things are revealed
Then quickly forgotten by the feel of a world
About to relax and make itself ready.
II.
Winter has become a year all its own.
It tastes on my tongue of a cello
Playing cascades of suites by Bach,
Continuing one after another without stop,
Each deep lowing expresses the joy
Of a universe still expanding in awe.
Yet, still I’m rooted firm to earth’s orbit,
Knowing it would be simple to only let go
And suddenly traveling at light’s speed,
Leave all fears behind, bound by gravity.
I think it’s what it must have been like
To be Einstein embraced in his reveries,
Questioning the knowns and doubts,
Accepting the unknown and finally,
Having no doubt about coming back,
Slipped the thin atmosphere surrounding
The world delicately drifting in space.
III.
Spring’s a flowery mutation all primed up;
A glandular mix of the sacred, the profane
And the pagan; Mardi gras madness—beads
Thrown out to bearing breasts with drunken ease;
Carnival gluttony stumbling into Lenten ash, and
Sacrifice. Ending lined up for the confessional
Ritual of Good Friday, still hungry yet, for more.
Yes, the rest’s more like a note left by winter,
The ground saturated with meltdown, into mud;
For me a season of cynics and sarcastic smiling.
When I was young in the sixties and it was all
For politics and sex, love bruising imaginations
Cut to the heart with the hot knife of living,
All caught up in the under currents of renewal
Expecting the world would change by our love.
Though, too, to be honest, my appreciation of
This season, is how it binds the rest with promise.
Always, some part of its fertile dance is woven
Into the cloth of days unfolding of what’s to be;
Always, with the thread of hopes to come.
IV.
Summer’s world is seen from the pitcher’s mound
Long before the crowd arrives. Slightly raised,
Closer to Home than any base, surrounded
By the green grass and raked red clay of possibility.
It is warm roundness and all light rolled out
Into lengths of days. An awakening of all there is;
Opens with clear fields of vision, mowed wind gusts
And dark thunder. A dry in your throat that is not
Thirst, but unquenchable anticipation.
Summer is body time – inside, outside, under
The fingernails dirty. It is Walt Whitman singing
America, while imagining the sweating bodies
Of young men, watching them swim naked,
Diving off a Brooklyn pier. It is a season
Demanding no quarter and giving none back
Except the secrets of Pleasure’s alchemy
Turning spun gold into the smell of memories.
It is a world of short close nights tipping
On a horizon’s infinity, gentle and tender. Full
Of all one can take from this earth if one chose
To leave it– more than, much more than that.
It is the season we first learn how dreams
Become the things they are, books opening,
Revealing every page at once; all the things
We can do and cannot do and can do them anyway.
Above all other importants. Above all else,
Summer dreams it is summer; it dreams itself.
What it is about, with a great consciousness
—All of its sinews, bones, muscles and blood in focus,
To see the object of all its exertions at night’s end
And the next day’s beginning; deep breaths filling
The heart, mind and soul with a pure, deep sleep;
The un-desperate, quiet sleep of summer dreams.
– Mr. K.A. Brace
Excerpt from: To Travel Without a Map: Poems; Mr. K. A. Brace, 9781493643004: Amazon.com: Books
© 2014, poem, portrait (below) and bookcover art, K.A. Brace, All rights reserved; flower photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved
K.A. BRACE (The Mirror Obscura) ~ With this work we introduce a new guest poet. K.B. (as he is popularly know among bloggers) is 61, lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his three dogs and four cats. He is a graduate of The State University of New York at Buffalo where he received both a Bachelor and Masters of Arts degree in English. While at the University he worked with Mac Hammond and Irving Feldman and was winner of The Arthur Axlerod Award for Poetry. After graduating he entered the hospitality industry and did not write for the next 35 years during which time he never considered himself not a poet stating that “a poet is one who has written a poem and may never write another.” Coinciding with his turning 60 he suddenly began writing again and is in the midst of finishing his eighth collection of poetry. He works assiduously for at least 10-12 hours 7 days a week at his writing. To Travel Without a Map is his first publication of a book length collection. His style is eclectic and his interest in modern myths and the tiny filaments of our humanity that connects us to one another are the centerpieces of his work. His poems are always surprising both in their crafting and their messages. He considers himself a ‘readers’ poet.
To Travel Without a Map: Poems; Mr. K. A. Brace, 9781493643004: Amazon.com: Books
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