Tag: autumn

Three Lake Poems of Lassen

~ mtngriff ~ Leave a comment

1

Calm sky
Endless forest
Early autumn quiet
Crackers, cheese and fruit
for lunch

Water low now
Its muddy bottom polished
In stillness
Cirrus pulling tendril threads
Over blue sky
Webs to catch our thoughts
As they rise idly
Into air

Summit Lake

2

Climbing down
To water
Guarded by block-barked Silver Pine
Narrow, droopy-topped Hemlock
Shadow-painted depths

That stuttering ‘kreek, kreek’
High in the sky

Sandhill cranes
Flying back north
across the dividing range
Unfurling clouds
Pausing to gape at their
Drifting, insistent
Flight

Shadow Lake

3

Autumn-yellow
Spirea
Edging the shallow
Muddy, green-yellow surface

Spears and crescents
Of refracted light
Haloing the cliffs
As one looks across
Towards lowering
Sun

Cliff Lake

26
IX
2020

Lassen National Park
Moon Waxing Gibbous

After visiting our daughter in Redding, a September day-trip led us to Lassen Volcanic National Park and a visit to a few of its glacial lakes. The volcanic rock holds fewer lakes than in the granitic terrain of the Sierra. So each lake is the more precious. Summit Lake is situated in open forest near the ‘summit’ of the main road that traverses the park. Shadow and Cliff Lakes are found along a 3 mile trail starting from a shoulder of Reading Ridge and both sit in glacial cirques carved out of the ridge. Forest is similar to the Sierra, but striking for its mature stands of Mountain Hemlock. Early autumn gave a crystalline clarity to the day. The photo is from the descent into Shadow Lake.

Truth of the Rose

~ mtngriff ~ Leave a comment 
November
 Drier than it has ever been
 In its meteorological silence
 Red roses bloom
 
 In the year 709
 From the founding of Rome
 Ab urbe condita
 Our 46 BCE
 Julius 
 Great reformer, soon to be murdered
 reset the days
 To end the ‘wandering years’
 And its calendrical 
 Confusion
 
 Yet drift the days still did
 By 3, said Bede in 800
 By 7 or 8
 Thought Roger Bacon much later
 Until again, from that same
 Rome
 Pontifical proclamation
 Added 10 days to the year 1582
 In an instant
 So that anniversaries and birthdays
 Were missed
 But human order now matched
 The flow
 Of the cosmos.
 
 Yet now
  in November
 The red rose blooms
 
 Calendrical days do not veer
 But earth itself
 We reread the ancient apocalypses
 For the like of their
 strange signs
 Flood and hurricane
 Pestilence, war
 Melting ice
 
 Seasons slip
 False springs occur
 We untruth the world
 And hide from it
 Saying that it, not us
 Is fake
 
 And still, the red rose
 Blooms. 
 

 24 November 2019
 Cedar Wings Cottage
 Dry earth and cloudless sky

* Ab urbe condita, from the founding of the city (Rome), Compare the Byzantine ‘etos kosmou,’ marking its calendrical year from the creation of the cosmos. In similar fashion to the work of Julius and Gregory, the International Committee on Stratigraphy is considering a date for our current geologic age, the Anthropocene, most likely dating from the deposition of radionuclides around the globe caused by nuclear testing from the 1950s.