This month, I’ve written words and posted images relating to the landscape of memory. I’ve shared poems, photos, quotes, and more prosaic thoughts related in some way to memory, nostalgia, longing for place, remembering and forgetting, landscape, dreamscape, landscape’s memory and memory’s landscape, the intersection of the layered historical physical world with personal memory, the frames that both landscape and memory use to contain and order our focus, the landscape of childhood, the landscape of devastation, how memories lie and tell the truth, the fragmentation of memory, how landscapes shape us and our memories, etc. All the posts are linked to the Introductory Page. Thanks for visiting.

Today, the final day, a poem.

*

Eventide

Now it’s the gloaming, that blue scattering
of lingering light, and the garden reposes
in pale shadow, returns bright pinks and whites
to the deepening sky, shifts and sighs
as the grass quietly grows.

The evening damp is a relief and a prayer.
A service of vespers hushes the air.
It’s not that nothing moves —
old memory flows up and down
each root, each stalk —
but a mute awareness stills the surface,
an uncontrived assent to what’s becoming
and what is and what was always there.

The dying light finds the garden’s true design,
the one that eludes me by day. The light is dying,
retracing itself, but as it fades it discloses:
the contours are truer than dreamed,
the edge utterly vanished yet trembling,
the collective breathing of the plants pulsing
like a revelation, like a constellation coming into view
as night drops, star by star appearing
as if it’s just arriving.

©MMWms 2020/2021

*

*

Featured photo: Gillenia trifoliata ‘Pink Profusion’ and white anemone sylvestris at 8 p.m. in June 2018