The way up is the way down

 yellow tree, Longwood Gardens

First frost this morning - 31 degrees, and promising more through the week.  The plants in my courtyard garden have not yet succumbed.

Here's a good November poem from Wallace Stevens:

 

"It is hard to hear the north wind again,

And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

 

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,

So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

 

Saying and saying, the way things say

On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

 

A revelation not yet intended.

It is like a critic of God, the world

 

And human nature, pensively seated

On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

 

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,

The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying."

-   Wallace Stevens, The Region November

 

 

art by Maya Lyndberg

and these lines, from Eliot's Four Quartets:

"I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same
    thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal rose or a lavender
    spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been
    opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the
    way back."

-   T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, III