September

When self contradiction creates a chasm between perception and reality, when action performs without a sense of premeditation, when the gulf between you and it becomes a mere gully, when the animal instinct is raw and uncontrollable:

Come elegant autumn and court my imagination, flirt with perfect poesy and stir summer’s drowsy waft. Not a fall day forgotten, nor a cool evening gone to waste, moonshine, starlight, streaming thoughts lost in the fathomless eons of space, the canvas on which knowledge and creativity combines, the palate on which colors swirl and new pigments are born. September tolls, the summer lolls and all that was sanguine feels winter at it’s heels, only during a Colorado September do the seconds feel like minutes and the minutes feel like hours and the hours, as they turn from green to yellow to orange to brown, feel like days- and what days they are! Days of ago when life was simple, life without distraction, life with the drunkards wit and the mistresses eye. Life, as autumn lingers this near future like a hanging Getz note, that resembles a strong, distilled liquor, it’s potent days and their lasting effects, their dizzying provocations, their intoxicating sights and smells and sounds. Ah to be drunk with life this September ere, to watch with beating blood the migrating birds’ flight south, to enjoy the familiar fall constellations as they slowly creep, smoothly slide, confidently crawl, across the night sky. The foothills a symphony of sound like Fitzgerald prose- awaken, take flight, capture the wild wind called fall, float about and spy, carefully consider her nature, her pigments, find her ticklish places, breathe in her perfumes sweet, tongue her flavors, paint her idiosyncrasies. September in all of her golden arcadia, dressed in her formal glitter, aspen leaves dancing, shivering, hymn singing, rhyme, September secretly secreting sappy syllables that slip slowly down your tongue, that slide in symphonic sounds out your mouth, that silently sink into the leaf laden ground and rattle against waterless roots. The evening air that cools like menthol and satisfies like a woman, September, a patient woman who knows exactly when. Hale moon light, crisp raspberry air and pennant races, its fall and the city poets will daydream at the bases of towering buildings, they will smell the stone and glass, they will hear the sun’s glancing reflection, they will feel the taxi horns and the pedestrians passing words, they will see rhyme braiding and slanking itself down the avenues and alley ways, all the literature, the beautiful poetry swirling, the language of the seasons changing- take wing, find flight and soar above the drowsy drones ! From this familiar vantage autumn cathedral bells peal from within, the smell of paints, ink and dusty novels, the taste of coffee roast mingling, rising, exploding the senses, overwhelming, sprint towards the setting sun slipping behind Pikes Peak, chase the season that’s so quick to fade, fade, fade into the snowy winter near. Sketch September with careful charcoal smears and fill in the gaps with warm colored crayons. Sweet seasonal inspiration! Take hold of this pen and move it as you like, fill these pages with smears and colors, address the fall constellations, whisper to the preparing animals, hark to us, the dreamers and poets, for your voice is tantalizingly right on time, and your song that encourages with subtle notes, that inspires with natural beauty, that seduces with a fall scent sweet and simple, sexy and soft. Alleluia!

And remember this September
who is the voice of her that you hear when you are dreaming
that no matter the weather
which is turning cool and gathering strength and energy
spend every evening
that are still plenty long and lasting and orange above mother Peak
writing poetry
that is the scent of the soul, the keeper of peace, the bearer of all that one needs to thrive.

Poem: "September" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams, "Looking Across South Park" 1897

The Messenger

There is some sentry at the rim of winter
Fed with the speech the wind makes
In the grand belfries of the sleepless timber.
He understands the lasting strife of tears,
And the way the world is strung;
He waits to warn all life with the tongue of March's
bugle,
Of the coming of the warrior sun.
When spring has garrisoned up her army of water,
A million grasses leave their tents, and stand in rows
To see their invincible brother.
Mending the winter's ruins with their laughter,
The flowers go out to their undestructive wars.

Walk in the woods and be witnesses,
You, the best of these poor children.

When Gabriel hit the bright shore of the world,
Yours were the eyes saw some
Star-sandalled stranger walk like lightning down the
air,
The morning the Mother of God
Loved and dreaded the message of an angel.

Poem: "The Messenger" Thomas Merton, 1944.
Photo: JG

Colorado's Children

You children born on this land wild and vast, bare-feet calloused, disheveled hair, rags, dirt, always that reddish dirt, you’re the lucky ones. Your forefather's campfires burn within you- spark- your lineage is life, full and hearty- flame- your stock is proud pioneer- smoke. Oh my children, on certain moonlit nights when, through the valleys and across the rolling hills, you hear the cantabile of the train whistle, the fiddle of its wheels on the track, the opus of its heavy load chugging along, when you smell the starlight in the caller of the Colorado air and you take a deep breath and feel the infinity of space stirring within your lungs, when you feel small and dizzy, when you breathe in and look about, when you breathe out and understand that the breadth of wilderness surrounding you is you, that the frost-shattered peak that made up your first horizon is you, that the rolling, capricious expanse of trees and rocks and wild is, all of it, you and you are it and it’s tangled and inevitable, it’s measureless and consuming, it’s elementarily simple and elegant. Oh my children, that's when you will begin to live! And the trees will no longer just be trees, nor the rocks rocks or the clouds clouds or you you, everything will be pregnant with meaning, with purpose, with will. This land called Colorado produces, dwelling unconsciously within all of us, a deep, deeper than the deepest mine shaft, soulful yearning, a powerful plea, a call to arms and adventure, a tug and pull, an undeniably necessary gravitational attraction towards all that is free, rebellious, untamed, towards all that is impossibly distant, high and buried, towards all that is unique, precarious and not recommended, towards all that is invisible, inopportune, and in-the-way. The yearning, the plea, the call, the tug. Oh my children, you providential sons and daughters of this wilderness, you are the valuable veins of gold that weave through the quartz and granite of normal existence, you have the precious strain of rebellion and reverie channeling through your souls, you dare to be what others can only dig for, you are the rarest of tellurides made up of concealed intellect, ruthless wit, instinctive awareness and feral resolve- this land is your land- oh my young ones, my lucky children, you will grow up with a mysterious sense of awe always hanging about- St. Elmo's fire, a mountain summit sunrise, a summer snowstorm, a crack of dry lightning, a looming gallows frame in the fog- you will befriend all of the animals, you will name the rocks and trees, you will follow the spring snowmelt and bathe in her bubbling pools, you will find the fragrant shade where the elusive herbs hide, you will have vast collections of fossils, bones and bird feathers, you will hear the distant Ute drum beat, feel its stir and heed its call. Oh passionate children, you are the lucky ones, you are the true bearers of verve, you are the archetypes, you are the kids who love life and whom life loves, you children can attain the heights of human zeal and confidence, you children have the esteem, wits and rarity necessary to be as untamed, striking, and enduring as the wildflowers- natures inherent impulse to emphasize beauty beyond strict necessity- that unfold themselves and spread across the endlessly reeling, fantastically fertile hillsides of a life lived fully.

Poem: "Colorado's Children" James Gagnon
Painting: Charles Partridge Adams "Spanish Peaks" Oil

Spirit That Form'd This Scene

Written in Platte Canon, Colorado

Spirit that form’d this scene,
These tumbled rock-piles grim and red,
These reckless heaven-ambitious peaks,
These gorges, turbulent-clear streams, this naked freshness,
These formless wild arrays, for reasons of their own,
I know thee, savage spirit—we have communed together,
Mine too such wild arrays, for reasons of their own;
Was’t charged against my chants they had forgotten art?
To fuse within themselves its rules precise and delicatesse?
The lyrist’s measur’d beat, the wrought-out temple’s grace—column and polish’d arch forgot?
But thou that revelest here—spirit that form’d this scene,
They have remember’d thee.

Poem: "Spirit That Form'd This Scene" Walt Whitman, from "From Noon to Starry Night" found in "Leaves of Grass" 1900.
Painting: Charles Ragland Bunnell