The dry smell which lingers well into autumn some years has already been replaced this season by that dank richness which damp brings. The woodlands beyond the fields are damp too, but distance prevents the even richer scents which now ferment there from reaching me. It is the smell of the residue of past seasons now layered, year upon year, slowly returning to soil atop still older soil atop the ancient rock of the mountains.
Every fallen leaf and dead blade of grass is still down there, and that part of the recent rain which soaked in rather than running off is now making its way through that mulch and soil and rock to some distant spring from which it might emerge decades or centuries or millennia hence. I wonder who might drink it then?
Sunday Verse
One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.