Beneath a clutter of last winter’s sweaters and board games, I discover a few poetry books. We’ve lived in this house for two years (and three summers of gardens). This weekend has been tidying-up chores, inside and outside.

The garden flowers sing their holy colors hard, hard, these days — pink cosmos and zinnias, that tangle of nasturtiums, the ever-present small beings of marigolds, and the sunflowers — without whom Vermont autumn is unimaginable.

…We did not come to remain whole.
We came to lose our leaves like the trees,
The trees that are broken
And start again, drawing up on great roots;
Like mad poets captured by the Moors,
Men who live out
A second life….

— Robert Bly, from “A Home in Dark Grass”