Elizabethan

I looked into my heart to write
   And found a desert there.
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Great summer sun, great summer sun,
   All loss burns in trophies;

--George Barker.

'Graves compared it to the Elizabethan word ‘virtue’, in its meaning of ‘act of blessedness’. 

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The act of translation, the act of love, making something one's own, letting it be. Let us have winter loving that the heart...The season where you are not to be found. And so I shall write you on my white page, and there you shall exist, a single brush-stroke of concentrated time, a pattern within the loving mind.

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Autumn has swept in, a dense mist of foreign particles hangs over us. The light dims, the temperature is lowered and we stumble in the dark morning light. We are reciprocal to this light, the quality of our intuition faltering with time.

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I am not myself any more. No matter how hard I try I cannot fathom the mechanism that works on me, the hands that would move all things away from their own moment.

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This autumn contains all seasons, looks back to summer and forwards to deep winter, to a wide field and a narrow road. In this time each brings an island in his heart to square with what he finds. We tap words to each other, like prisoners across a wall. 

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Now autumn arrives-and there's an exact word for it that you've forgotten. A word that strays but is true. We collect quotations and sayings the way other people collect boxes or firewood, imagining the surprise or the sparks they contain. 

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You remember the darkest night, many Novembers ago, the old shops with their thick glass windows and old wooden frames, the Norsemen and women strangers in their own home. And November is a season of forgiveness and burning. The straw men we carried now put back in the back rooms or attics, straw returning to straw to straw...

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But every season is a kind 

of rich nostalgia. We give names-

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Turn back the clocks, save some time or expend it, let it flow and collect in the fields the way the Roding floods the flat land around it.

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I am carried back against

my will into a childhood where

Autumn is bonfires, marble and smoke.

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You carry a word with you, deep in your grave pocket, waiting for a time to unfold it, so that it becomes a mirror to your soul.

[(words by Elizabeth Jennings)].