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May 28, 2006

Memory's Brown

October 16, 2007 03:50 PM UTC

views: 0 | comments: 34

MEMORY'S BROWN
The autumn light falls hard
through stiffened air.
It warms, but to the eye
already death is there.
The spirit that enjoyed
its summer days
makes last show in these
deep mellow colors
which subtlely betray
the growing strength of darkness
and will resolve at last
into wind-blown drifts
of life-formed ash.
My heart is full, of summer,
and my soul is gorging still
on all the play of hue...
but I'll conserve my warmth
with vests of stolen wool
and bring dark thoughts
of a final star-reft night
back to the bedded coals
where always I see you.

(c) John Harris Beck

Find more about: memory, random musings, random musics, autumn, poem, poetry, colors

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Comments: 34

Svetlana Goryacheva Oct 16, 2007, 3:54pm UTC

As always, dear friend, a pure delight to read... you've grasped the bittersweet emotion so powerfully that one can feel it almost physically!..

Blessings and best wishes -S.

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Granny Janny Oct 16, 2007, 5:03pm UTC

Dear John, I am wild about this one because it sings this season so colorfully and bridges summer, fall, and winter with ivory to ebony tones finely tuned from joy to melancholy. I am there with you, in the woolly night staring at the fire and wondering about the memory you write.
And I am here on a rainy afternoon wondering how you so capably orchestrated this
solemn ballad.

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Faith H. Oct 16, 2007, 5:08pm UTC

I do like the first lines, the hard light brings an image of harshness to the regret for summer's passage. Autumn is my favorite place.

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P C. Oct 16, 2007, 5:16pm UTC

This is an excellent peice. I really enjoyed it. You word choice and phrasing is superb

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Fred Hose Oct 16, 2007, 5:52pm UTC

John
This summer into autumn poem is beautiful and paints the feeling of loss one has when the grey of winter comes near.
One peeps into the narrator's heart and sees there too a summer into autumn change. You bring out the despair perfectly. Well done.

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Kathryn Flynn Oct 16, 2007, 7:55pm UTC

Superb, my dear man.

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Glenn T. Oct 16, 2007, 8:27pm UTC

Palpable warmth finds seasonal drift , and ash marks time in decay. Sensory delight, John, and very alive!

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Smaragdus M. Oct 16, 2007, 10:21pm UTC

The first stanza brings to light our inevitable aging- our inevitable death... the second stanza implies love is immortal and you will stave off death with the powers with which love/passion, lust for life has comforted/ stimulated you to live on.

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John Harris Beck Oct 16, 2007, 10:37pm UTC

Wow! Thanks for coming by, everyone.

Sveta, this would be close to the Russian heart, I think; it sees so much all at once.

Jan, this is new, for this leaf-fall and not some past one, and yes, it brought itself back around to a memory, a loss? at this time of year. Your description is marvelous, sneaking in a piano, I think.

Faith, good we "see the light" together.

Patricia, thank you!

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John Harris Beck Oct 16, 2007, 10:40pm UTC

Amy, I hope dinner was wonderful, thanks for the notice.

Dean, I'm tilting your way on "dissolve." Thanks for that fine-tuned reading.

Thank you, Fred. This started in the sunshine and follow autumn on out. It is the season of Hallowe'en, after all, in its deeper sense.

Kathryn, a bow to you!

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John Harris Beck Oct 16, 2007, 10:45pm UTC

Glenn, you pen a lovely comment...

Smaragdus, greetings and thanks, you turn the end back to the warm glow. And though I do have a tiny honey jar full of ash, it is the warmth that is more real, enduring.

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Carolion Grailbear Oct 16, 2007, 11:43pm UTC

This made me think, first thing, that perhaps "Adam" was not made of mud/clay at all, at all - but of ASH - and that, the ash of the ghat, mixed with the waters of the Ganges.

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P C. Oct 17, 2007, 7:03am UTC

I came back to read it again.

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James Ciriaco Oct 17, 2007, 12:17pm UTC

This is really lovely, John, and strikes the reader immediately. I like the fact that it moves from a sense of crispness that the warmth of sunlight can't quite touch, through the phrase "deep mellow colors," to the warmth of hearth and loved ones where death still lingers in shorn wool and dark thoughts. Cold with a show of warmth gives way to warmth with a touch of chill.

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Gerry Wass Oct 17, 2007, 1:47pm UTC

It does indeed strike us immediately. I find myself thinking, on my second visit, that air is as hard to write about as water, perhaps even more so, and part of what grabbed me was that "stiffened air." And it continues all the way through to that haunting ending that seems to propel me way beyond words, seeing a memory in burning campfire coals on a dark night. You touch a wide swath of universal experience in the coming of cold and all the gratitude it brings for such color and warmth as still lingers.

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MW Q. Oct 17, 2007, 3:12pm UTC

John, since I paint too, a lot of my impressions are in color--vivid images captured in words....and you create such a moving, musical, soft impression with this poem. I particularly enjoyed the second stanza, the intriguing

' my soul is gorging still
on all the play of hue...'

Coals, wool, warmth...sounds like a promising, enriching winter is on the way, with more poems in it's warm fingers.

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vickie f. Oct 17, 2007, 7:03pm UTC

Outstanding writing, really enjoyed it

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John Harris Beck Oct 17, 2007, 7:16pm UTC

Carolion, there's a line of thought that "mere chemicals" that have been part of a living organism retain some special character, somehow. That's what your musing on adam-clay and ash brings to mind.

Patricia, Amy, thanks for coming back. I like that!

James, you add to my sense of the form, not surprisingly, given your fine work.

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John Harris Beck Oct 17, 2007, 7:22pm UTC

Gerry, I've just been doing some prose writing about other ways of seeing evolution, using the old earth-water-air-fire (which are still used by physicists as solid-fluid-gas and thermo-). That probably helped me find a word for the fall air. Yes, and campfires, such a magical thing to grow up with.

Minnie, glad this pleases a painter's mind's eye. And yes, we need to take care of our warmth now, physically as well as otherwise.

Thank you, Vickie, for comment and moon-in-the-bare-trees icon, which goes with this.

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Tom C. Oct 17, 2007, 8:03pm UTC

The spirit that enjoyed
its summer days
makes last show in these
deep mellow colors
which subtlely betray
the growing strength of darkness

John, this is so wonderful, the glowing, fading beauty of a love that is succumbing to its end. I can't think of a lovelier phrasing of the change from one season to the next.

I'm also intrigued by your title. I'm probably asea here (normal) but I thought of Frost's implication that memory is subconsciously shifted by the rememberer, moreso as time goes by. Suddenly, what was brown has become a memory of a floral explosion. No matter the memory, the bedded coals can reimage it. LOL. I'm laughing at my own comment. It made me think, which is good, as long as you don't care WHAT I think. :-)

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John Harris Beck Oct 17, 2007, 8:42pm UTC

No, Tom, I desire no mind control. No reaction is always a disappointment, except that everyone has so much to be preoccupied with anyway. But I'm glad you like it, knowing you better and better and your own zealous engagement with words.

"Memory's Brown" -- I'm surprised you're the first to ask about that. I'd just been dipping into poetry of Archibald MacLeish (Archie to us), and a favorite of his is "Memory Green." It has an intense seasonal feel to it, so I thought, maybe this can work with brown. And here you go and find a much richer explanation for it! Well, that's what we're here for. I want to look into Frost again one of these days, thanks for mentioning him.

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Laura M. Oct 18, 2007, 5:33pm UTC

There is a sense of firmly grounded but pivotal soul placement in this richly orchestrated verse that allows the thoughts and senses to travel like roots reaching out through the earth to taste the most primal stirrings of life, season and spirit, transversing through a history's constant renewal through memory and "bedded coals" to resonate and re-time the qualia to the rhythms of life's comings and goings, warmth and chill, light and darkness, all fused here into one full breath of a very meded consciousness. This is so, so full......I feel so sated every reading of it. The tone is of the earth...all shades....even silently alluding to the unmentioned and melodious greens of spring that birth the cycle into its inspiration.....the youth of leaf and soul vibrations, knowing that there will be a time limit to their celebrations. In fall, perhaps, we reflect more as we do in the latter seasons of our lives.

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John Harris Beck Oct 18, 2007, 9:30pm UTC

The warmth of your appreciative embrace is always welcome, Laura. Just came from your latest posting, finding there again the inner quiet you are able to bring to word sense. A blessing: thanks.

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Neal Wass Oct 20, 2007, 4:52pm UTC

Yes there are elements of death, finality and loss, but this poem speaks to so much more. The almost fierce decision to persevere, to communicate something positive to another is what strikes me. I really like what Laura had to say. It seems that as we age, walls aren't so insurmountable and endings aren't so final. There is always something left, even if it is only a coal.
This poem is worth reading over and over again…and I have.

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Charlotte Babb Maven-Fairy Godmother Oct 20, 2007, 10:49pm UTC

I do love the return of the heat of summer to a banked fire of coals and ash, the life force within love, even in the cold and dark.

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Barbary C. Oct 20, 2007, 11:34pm UTC

John,

The idea of stolen wool strikes my fancy.
Your poem is circles, written in a hand natural as the seasons.

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John Harris Beck Oct 21, 2007, 1:32am UTC

Neal, as I age I aspire...to finally get out of the box!

Charlotte, glad to meet you. See you around!

Barbary, I'm glad you favor stolen wool, at least in some circumstances. We won't go into any details! Circles... I'll have to find a protractor and check that. But it did feel natural coming out, can't deny that. Thank you.

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John F Walter Oct 22, 2007, 3:25pm UTC

Beautiful lyric of a poem, John. I won´t go through a long interpretation of this one (actually I can´t, since it´s simple and straightforward and its rewards are sonic and imagistic) but I can say that you catch the feeling nicely of death within decay as the summer´s heat fades into winter´s chill, autumn sort of a halfway house really, an exquisite purgatory of the senses.

I especially the second stanza, so personal, transferring the imagery of this riotous abundance in the fading of heat and light--¨My heart is full, of summer,/and my soul is gorging still/on all the play of hue...¨--to a lover or friend, and indirectly to the reader.

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