the first day of autumn

i took this picture in my backyard last autumn.

carving up other people’s work is a sort of sacrilege i suppose - in their wholeness, they are complete and in their fractured selves, a decision is embedded by the person(s) responsible for the fracturing that suggests they might somehow be above it all.
iit could be assumed that the carver assumes: “here’s the best bits. i didn’t think much of the rest.”
and yet often when i read a poem, listen to a cd, watch a movie, reflect on a memory, look at a slide show, i am left with the one bit, element, or component that really rocked for me. spoke to me. touched me. changed me. for example, here it is the first day of autumn and to celebrate, here are two bits of a larger poem by baudelaire on that very subject. they carry the essence of his poem and carry weight all on their own.

Autumn

Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows,
And all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone.

-- It was summer yesterday; now it's autumn.
Echoes of departure keep resounding in the air.

-Charles Baudelaire

the arrival of autumn is filled with associations - as a kid it meant the return of street hockey, it also meant that school was for real because somehow when it was still warm and sunny and you could wear shorts and short sleeved shirts to school it was almost like a play. but when you had to wear long pants and a jacket and you got to really thinking about how to protect your body from the chill, it made it all seem real.
obviously it also links into winter. i find that most people i know dread the coming of winter - for the loss of sunlight, the loss of warmth, the loss of the outside world, the loss of plant life, the loss of long chats with the neighbours, in short; the loss of a lot of freedoms.
there’s goodness in the autumn and the winter and once you’re inside the changes you can find it. many acquaintances have established a kind of sporting relationship with winter seeing it as an opportunity to skate and ski and frolic in the outdoors. i’ll be honest - i can deal with winter and see its beauty, but i much prefer being physically and psychologically comfortable and for me that means a degree of warmth. or many degrees!
here's another picture from last autumn:
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