November

The ninth month of the year, before the Julians changed the calendar, 
promoting their household, claiming the glories of high summer for their own: 
Julius, Augustus….

November, ninth month, one could call it “term.” 
A welcome arrival, when development leads to fruition 
and fruition leads to birth.

November, ninth month, pushed ahead. 
Relegated to the Fall-of-the-year, 
to that time when the glow of fulfillment has faded 
and the eventual closing-in and collapse of abundance 
starts to bite in earnest.

A time of lack. 
No light, no warmth, no harvest; 
but frost and a cold, silvery moon.

To the Julians it was clear 
they were claiming a high point for their age. 
They understood. 
After them would come a reckoning, 
a Fall, an Autumn.

This Autumn of ours caught us by surprise. 
This was not what we expected. 
No matter what signs and portents. 
Not so much…. No matter; 
but we have grown so accustomed to looking ahead; 
ever faster, ever farther.

And always seeing, 
reflected in that deceiving mirror, 
only what we want to see. 
Visions of Augustan triumphs 
following each Julian consolidation of power. 
The results compound like the figures in our ledgers 
endlessly reaching for the impossible 
and seemingly getting there.

No wonder we did not see what we were forging, 
hidden inside our dreams, 
the only possible result of all our striving.

November. Ninth month. 
Too late to mistake a mild afternoon 
for the return of harvest’s bounty.

Even as things get hotter, 
we experience so much of this 
as a descent into winter. 
Desert people would have a more apt image 
perhaps, for when the brief cool and moisture of a precocious Spring 
withers into a blazing dry and barren summer.

We enter this tale in November. 
We do not know where it leads.

We can only be certain it does not lead 
back to anything we would recognize. 
It is only after some far-off new Spring 
has accommodated with the ravages of this long, 
dead season that it can ever again become clear 
how this particular dark harvest, this slim chance 
of any regrowth, was necessary. 
That it could have been arrived at 
in no other way.

From here, all we can see is what has been lost, 
what continues to be at risk. 
All vectors head away from any possible promise.

November. Ninth month. 
We do have practice at this sort of thing. 
We have often had to negotiate a time 
when good-news was scarce. 
When there were no signs of hope.

A good thing. We have always needed some way 
to adjust our proclivity to settle into expectations 
and wallow in the sterile seductions of maximizing 
our imagined delights at the expense of our real treasure.

Even now, this November upon us, 
it is dawning clarity that we are more alive 
in this time of contraction than in the queasy midst 
of heady surfeit and undemanding ease which brought us here.

We find our strength, instead of looking for some advantage.

We find each other, and in so doing, 
recognize what we’ve been so sorely lacking; 
what drove the manias that brought us here.

November. 
Ninth month, 
no longer.

10.17.15

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