As I walk through the gardens around the house, with the peony blooms ruptured on the ends of their long, bent stems, the water lilies, pink and white, afloat in the pond, the foxglove, prairie fire, pansies, forget-me-nots, once pink, now blue, dandelions, bright yellow, and geodesic dandelion clocks, roses and daisies, and all the trees in the forest heavy with their million shades of green, I feel an autumnal nostalgia even though summer has just begun. The solstice and the slow descent into darkness, into the silence of the pre-vegetative state, burial in dirt dark winter. Wallace Stevens’ poem The Beginning turns this moment into a woman’s departure. But her dress still lies on the floor– she’s only sleeping.
The Beginning by Wallace Stevens
So summer comes in the end to these few stains
And the rust and rot of the door through which she
went.
The house is empty. But here is where she sat
To comb her dewy hair, a touchless light,
Perplexed by its darker iridescences.
This was the glass in which she used to look
At the moment’s being, without history,
The self of summer perfectly perceived,
And feel its country gayety and smile
And be surprised and tremble, hand and lip.
This is the chair from which she gathered up
Her dress, the carefulest, commodious weave
Inwoven by a weaver to twelve bells. . .
The dress is lying, cast-off, on the floor.
Now, the first tutoyers of tragedy
Speak softly, to begin with, in the eaves.
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