I get to say this – the picture came first, and then the poem found me a few hours later.  Poetry has its mysterious ways, especially Rilke.  Thank you for visiting Autumn with me.  The trees and I will always remember.

Autumn by Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning ‘”no.”

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling.  This hand here is falling
And look at the other one…It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling.

From Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,  by Robert Bly, 1981.

Its fun when you make something, and find a place you have never been before.  (Even if other people have gone there, its nice when you find it yourself.)

Picturing autumn has been difficult.  So much of the spectacle happens far away, and if there is anything I like a camera for, it’s getting close.  Siennas and ochres and vermillions trace the horizon of roller-coastering hills, containing the uniform fields of sandy colored stalks – maybe corn, maybe soy – waiting to be chewed up by mega-harvesters, and sent on their way to fuel someone or something.  The low afternoon light seems to articulate every leaf as it lifts and twists obediently in a gust of wind a quarter of a mile away.  Its all I can do to tear my eyes away and get back to watching the road ahead.   These distant visions are something I can’t keep or be a part of.  I just have to let them transmigrate into the rear view mirror, then disappear – another soul that can’t be trapped.  The trees are showing off entirely for themselves – some kind of reward for a summer well spent spinning sunlight into gold.

For today, I guess I am giving up on the mind-blowing glut of color that is ravenously consuming the green on every hill and roadside and city street in the vicinity of Verona, Wisconsin.  Not because I am not frantic with delight in it – just the opposite, in fact.  My eyes, my field of vision, have so far proved too puny to reckon the scale of autumn’s achievement this year.  Leaves red like they tore your heart out; molten yellow rippling in the breeze; and every shade of fire and ember playing out in between.  My arms just aren’t big enough to embrace it all.

I might have a go again tomorrow, though.

Little spoons
slurping up star-shine
at last shine it back
to the stars.

At the risk of stating the obvious, much of the time when I take pictures with my phone, I can’t see anything.  (Well, I can hardly see anything.) The screen is black-shiny and dull-grimy from greasy fingers and ears.  I am too cold or too hot or too bent too uncomfortably into some photo-yoga contortion to watch the viewfinder for very long.  I take pictures anyway.  Occasionally this results in seeing something.  Felicitous, visual accidents beyond the confines of deliberate craft are irritants.  If they can’t be repeated, how can you know their true value?  What do they signify about the creator and the viewer?  Have I succeeded or failed?

It seems like the leaves have all the answers to those questions.

The story is this:  summer is blowing away, carried to ground in yellow corpuscles riding thick-misted turbulent skies which admit no slant of the sunlight that formed into green only days ago.  In the library parking lot, I saw this was so, and felt guilty ignoring my part.  And though I tried my best, my camera was the only honest witness to the leaves’ unwinding.

These are the good old days…
                             – Carly Simon

For about a week, the weather has been intensely blue, shimmering gold sunlight and leaves so pungently red the maples seem to be blooming fire.  In front of Oakwood Village Senior Living facility, a family of 3 or 4 young trees gather all the sunshine into their yellow leaves, illuminating Mineral Point Road as decadently as any aspen covered mountain side, while the busses grumble by.  I’ve been making excuses to myself about why I wouldn’t stop to find pictures among these wonders.  Too tired, not feeling inspired, can’t risk hurting my back again.  Like most excuses, mine seemed very, very good.

The rain finally came today.  It’s not like the rain spoils the autumn presence of maples and aspens and ash, and even the leathery russet of oaks – far from it.  The water saturates their colors and blackens the structure of their branches.  And together, the leaves and branches lean closer to the soggy earth, as rain accumulates along the crevices and bark and twigs and veins.  You’d think it would be very picture perfect, and you’d be right.  Still, for the sake of my reasons, I drove past fence rows of cherry pink euonymous, not stopping to thank them for holding winter at bay with their furious color.  All my reasons – anxieties, important errands, embarrassment, discomfort – made a lot of sense to me at the time.

But today the rain finally came, and suddenly I wanted a picture from sunny day.  Everyone knows today’s rain means autumn can’t go on forever.  And we think we know what’s coming, after the trees finally disrobe down to their skinny arms and legs, and the snow tires are on the car.  But all we really know is yesterday the yard was full of orange leaves, star-shaped and perfect, waiting for us to rake them before it rained.

The light was suddenly so pretty on the bookcase, from where I was sitting on the couch, reading and ruminating.  Moments earlier, I was caught in one of the dilemmas that has defined my character throughout my life:  the fight to somehow quell a sense of emotional injustice without confessing that I deserved my punishment.  This demon is so persistent that only one way has been left open to me – a detente.  I am trying to take a further step, beyond ceasing inner hostilities.  Since this contorted self-reflection goes where I go, lives where I live, I have to ask myself not only “How do I live with it?”  but, “Aren’t other people suffering in exactly this same way?”

And so I cling to a deep feeling in my heart that my best, truest chance to connect with other people, comes from sticking with my demon the way it has stuck with me.  I will not find that experience at any other more blissful address.  And I won’t be humble, and I won’t be right.  But I will be brave enough to let the light on plastic roses get me off the couch, and see what happens next.

I visited the pond a few days ago.  On a scale of natural wonders, I guess it is really more of a puddle.  Spectacular beauty rubs me the wrong way, like positive people and too much organization – so I am happy walking around my puddle, seeing what there is to see for 20 minutes or so.  The path is pretty short from the edge of the parking lot to the fork that follows the pond, so I often just stand there, to make the trip last longer.  Standing still at the fork in a path has its rewards.  On Tuesday, I stopped because I realized I was expecting to hear a lot of bird song, and there wasn’t any.  “Have the birds already left for the winter?”  I wondered.  Maybe they felt the portents of a bitter, implacable freeze poised to seep into every crevice of feather and grass, and literally flew the coop.

So I stood.  And gradually, as often happens when you stop moving, the world came to me. It was true, the birds weren’t singing.  But along the willow branches that skim the pond’s surface, and between the rigid skeletons of milkweed crowded with seed pods, pale brown and yellow bellies flashed, grey and blue black feathers shimmered.  Suddenly, I saw they were everywhere – goldfinches, chickadees, grackles – even a robin.  They moved restlessly in crowds and alone, from the birch behind the path, to the deep green shadows near the water, with purpose, not play – intently fulfilling some instinct that only they have the wisdom to follow.

I can’t wait for some better chance to see something beautiful.  My little puddle surrounded by birds and thoughtless asters is already more than I know how to say.  I come to this path because I can’t be anywhere else.  At least nowhere I can see more constellations of starry flowers today.

A broken branch spilled apples on the ground.  I guess someone was climbing where they shouldn’t.  But what could be more tempting than an apple tree, when it looks like the perfect fruit is just over…there…if I can…reach a little…farther…

I want to say something about how my pictures are looking lately – all unsharp and de-composed.  I get to reference my own photography and critique it and explain it, because well, this is a self-conscious blog, and you know what you are in for if you bother reading this far.

Sharp pictures are just not making me that happy anymore.  I made a sharp version of this, more or less.  But sharp doesn’t give me the feeling that I have crawled through the lens, and into the image.  This place seems like an entryway or a passage, but I don’t know where to.  The camera seems to be my way in.  I am more interested in seeing the apples becoming something, than I am in seeing exactly how they are.  And I am becoming something, too.