Three Pieces

A bite on the radio, that bit me: one street over from our park, a man shot in the chest last night.

Leaving my driveway, two boys in bright red slogan & commercialized loungewearish track suits greeting joyfully middle-aged women swathed in African prints.

The sky starts to ice over, like a windshield.

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.