The Wheeling Year: A Poet's Field Book

September

57 SEPTEMBER One of our old neglected apple trees is so burdened with fruit this year that a limb has cracked, turned brown, and drapes limpwristed , bejewelled with apples that ripen, day after day, on those lifeless fingers. This morning I noticed that hornets have come to set each garnet in a golden filigree. Labor Day weekend, rainy and cool, and the second hatch of barn swallows are still in their nest under the eaves, three of them, downy and mewing, their beaks like buds just opening, while the rest of the swallows, an extended family of a dozen or more including the year’s first hatch, wheel round and round this axis, crying, as if to unwind the invisible thread that holds them here, with winter coming. Strung among withering leaves along a cantaloupe vine, a half dozen Japanese lanterns glow with a pale, parched light, their brown shades scorched to the point of sagging, while at the end of a fraying extension cord of squash vine one fat yellow lightbulb glows dimmer under the weeds. I am afraid that the elf who comes in late November to unpack winter, tossing the tissue of snow, will never be able to undo the knots from this string of Christmas lights, these fat green cucumbers , burned out and black, cold to the touch. 58 I am tired of garden work, of trying to light my days with produce—the tapers of carrots, the fat votive candles of fresh tomatoes, the shuttered lanterns of eggplant—and so I turn away at last and leave them fading to darkness as the first leaves fall, like sparks, setting the fields afire. All through the night a rain that is a woman with thin, cold hands, has been preparing this room in the corner of autumn, standing back for a look, then stepping forward again to adjust this or that. Her cold, wet fingertips touch everything once, then once again, but she is not pleased with the way things look: perhaps this yellow leaf needs to be turned just slightly and leaned against the brown. Early in the morning, I push open the door to look outside and they drop like a hard rain out of the top of the frame where they’ve rested all night, a dozen or more moth millers—or is it miller moths?—fat as the tips of my fingers, tapping the porch floor with their dusty stupor. For a moment they lie still, some of them upside down or tipped on their sides against the dewy sill, their tiny black eyes bright but baffled, for they have slept so hard they’ve forgotten how to fly. They look a little like wood chips lying next to a stump where a man might have split kindling for his stove, but then, with a flutter, they right themselves, remembering that they have wings, and fly this way and that, into my hair, onto my nightshirt, into my face, as if I were made of a steady light and were irresistible, but I am not, just somebody at his open door, fussily brushing these chips away, struck chop by chop from dawn. When she had finished letting down a cuff, or shortening a hem, or sewing a button back on a shirt, she’d pull the thread out tight, one lifting sweep and then another, as if she were conducting an SEPTEMBER 59 orchestra of light and silence in that sunny room, then deftly knot off the music, clip the ends, and add them to a little nest of thread on the arm of her sewing chair. Not much of a nest, too loosely and carelessly woven, all orange and blue and white, and strong enough, it seems, to have held those hours I watched my mother at her work. An old man in bib overalls and his wife in a housedress bring their blind daughter to lunch, a big woman of forty in slacks and a blouse, and those of us nearby are drawn within their love, dissolved within it, and, for a little while, the world is healed for us, a dozen ordinary customers, having the Wednesday special— pork roast, potato dumplings, kraut, and applesauce—served on styrofoam plates as autumn comes on, leading a few yellow cottonwood leaves up to the open door. I like the looks of farm dumps, almost always filling a ditch in a...