`But We Are Seasonal'

The season tips in October, even in Houston. We open windows at night and turn off the air conditioning. The cat sits with his nose against the screen, sniffing as though he were reading the air. On campus I found a hummingbird on the ground beneath a large window in the library. I lifted him by the wing, the first time I’ve ever touched a hummingbird, and he was still iridescent and almost weightless. No leaves have changed color but the long needles of the loblollies fall and collect in brown drifts. From her farm my boss brings sacks of peppers, five kinds, red and green. Charles Tomlinson published “October” in The Shaft (1978):
 

“Autumn seems ending: there is lassitude

Wherever ripeness has not filled its brood

Of rinds and rounds: all promises are fleshed

Or now they fail. Far gone, these blackberries —

For each one that you pull, two others fall

Full of themselves, the leaves slick with their ooze:

Awaiting cold, we welcome in the frost

To cleanse these purples, this discandying,

As eagerly as we shall look to spring.”
 

“Ripeness” is Shakespearian and Keatsian, defining a moment of gain and loss, quintessentially human. The dread of autumn and winter has never made sense. We live by rhythms bigger than ourselves, some hardly suspected, and perhaps we’re happiest, or least the least unhappy, when we align ourselves with them. Another poem titled “October” is by the late Tom Disch (About the Size of It, 2007):
 

“Without the fables of these falling leaves

How would we know how to die? Living on

The veldt we would have to imagine ourselves

Falling prey to lions, praying to leonine gods,

Devourers of our kind. Heaven forbid. Better

To give lip service to the myths of these

More temperate climes, the Aurora of autumn,

April’s putative cruelty, June’s spoonfuls

Of ripe berries. Then if our poets cry

Ashes, ashes, all fall down, we have been

Fortified, inoculated, preserved

Against the day we would have come, if not

To dust, to some similar dismal

Conclusion. But we don’t. We continue

Living, in a manner of speaking, the lives

We have agreed to live, just like these

Deciduous trees, whose leaves we have learned

To make our teas from. We rustle

In the breeze and taking our dying falls,

But we are seasonal, our hours and our days

Recurring, even as the South Pole dies,

Even as we tell ourselves these lies.”

Again, berries and ripeness, signs of the season. Speaking of "mellow fruitfulness," here's a passage from the letter Keats wrote on Sept. 22, 1819, three days after writing "To Autumn," to his friend Charles W. Dilke:

"Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine--good god how fine--It went down soft pulpy, slushy, oozy--all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry."