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The Nature of This
The summer's coming to a close.
The river where we panned for gold
will soon be strewn with broken leaves.
The sego lily and the rose
have quieted. Today it seems
that all the world is gentling.
We have let go of clutching things.
Here we watch the seasons go
and come with a surprising ease.
It isn't that we're growing old.
It isn't that we've bested fear
or that we never wake to know
in spite of love, we die alone.
The air is cool and sweet with change.
Breathe in, it says, and let go.
It is enough to fall in love.
To fall in love and watch the world unfold.
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I like the way this poem uses the "close/gold/know" rhymes and half-rhymes to thread the lines together. It has a bell-like quality, that repetition, that works well with tetrameter lines. The lines tend to such regularity that the three different ones--lines 6 and 15 one syllable short, and 17 longer by a foot--feel unjustified and not quite satisfying. If the differences had been greater, maybe they would have worked better: small differences in meter seem to trouble the ear more than big ones, because they feel just "off" enough to be mistakes and not enough to be deliberate play.
The ending doesn't feel quite justified by what precedes it, either. Seasonal imagery suggests aging, regret for lost youth, not the value of falling in love, and certainly not watching "the world unfold." If there is a connection between the "letting go" theme of stanza one and this very surprising ending, I'm missing it and hope someone will point it out to me.
~Rhina
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