`Life Dances Upon Life's Grave'

Much of the Japanese portion of the Bellevue Botanical Garden is cool, shaded and damp. Moss and lichens cover stones, trees and benches. Flowers and insects are scarce. The Yao Garden is dense with cedars, pines, rhododendrons, azaleas, viburnums and beautiful Japanese maples, and feels like a pocket of seclusion within the larger garden. Most of the foliage remains green. Friday morning we climbed a curving stone stairs and entered a golden light. The leaves of the locust tree above us have turned buttery yellow, the sunlight pouring through them and – what? the first word that came to mind was the somewhat fusty “burnished.” The leaves and light burnished us and the path, and for a moment our sun-mottled corner felt enchanted. I thought of “Autumn,” one of four poems that make up R.S. Thomas’ “The Seasons”:

“Happy the leaves
burnishing their own
downfall. Life dances
upon life’s grave.
It is we who inject
sadness into the migrant’s
cry. We are so long
in dying – time granted
to discover a purpose
in our decay? Could
we be cut open,
would there be more than
the saw’s wound, all
humanity’s rings widening
only towards ageing?
To creep in for shelter
under the bone’s tree
is to be charred by time’s
lightning stroke. The leaves
fall variously as do thoughts
to reveal the bareness
of the mind’s landscape
through which we must press on
towards the openness of its horizons.”

This is late Thomas, from Mass for Hard Times (1992), and dazzling: “Life dances/upon life’s grave.” Autumn rivals spring for the tonnage of fuel it lends clichés, but Thomas fashions a leafy cascade of metaphors that sounds faintly Japanese in my ear – perhaps colored by Yao Garden. Earlier we had watched an orb weaver wrapping a bee in silk. The insect twitched as its white cocoon grew thicker and more opaque. I blew on the web and the spider ignored me and went about his business. Matsuo Bashō writes:

"What voice,
What song, spider,
In the autumn?”