The Green of Autumn

"Love and other Mysteries" and Richard Wilbur's "The Beautiful Changes"

Hello, Poetry Friend

My northern friends are writing about fall changing to winter, while I am writing about a Texas Hill Country fall that is still green. Green is not supposed to be an autumn color, but it’s the color we’re given in Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Beautiful Changes,” a poem about autumn and love.

Here is the second stanza:

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

–Richard Wilbur, from "The Beautiful Changes"

Love, in whatever season it begins, is ever-green. My poetry collection, Love and other Mysteries, contains eight love poems. I tuned my pencil like a mantis to the leaves of the ancient, erotic text of Song of Solomon, and, hopefully, the resulting poems make the leaf a little leafier for you.

I am almost 54 years old, which is an odd age to be writing love poems. I didn’t start writing them until a couple of years ago. Deep greenness was there, waiting.

“The beautiful changes,” Wilbur writes, and he writes it twice in the poem and once in the title. The beautiful in my life has changed in ways I never could have predicted. My husband and I like to joke, along with Indiana Jones, that “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage.” Who could have predicted such November greenness? And how can we not enjoy it while it lasts?

WINTERPAST
Songs 2

I’d recognize your truck anywhere
     (I know where you usually park)
     I fake reasons to drive past your house

Once I saw you on a Thursday morning
     came back: same time, same spot,
     desperate to catch your eye again (your wildflower smile)

(God in Heaven) once I glimpsed you
     in fresh-pressed jeans and boots and I was ready
     to leave everything everyone follow you everywhere

Your words are saved in a secret place
     telling me things I already know
     (I pretend not to know)

One winterpast I saw your name on a playlist
     and now I can’t not see your name every time
     I pull it up (I often pull it up)

 Like that tune about mistletoe, the one stuck on repeat,
     every note how I feel when I’m with you
     (wordless)

–Megan Willome
from Love and other Mysteries

Happy poeming!

Megan