Geese call tonight,
dusk brings quiet chill—
tea, candles, blankets:
invocations of  pleasure.
No more flying backward.
No more ancient grief.
Mistake after mistake,
the cool wind absolves.

esp - 9/4/00

EPHEMERIS FOR THE SIXTH WEEK OF LATE SUMMER
The Hummingbird Flocking Moon is full on September 4 at 11:03 a.m. It wanes gibbous throughout next week, entering its final quarter on September 11 at 9:16 p.m.

Venus replaces Saturn in Leo this month, low on the horizon before sunrise. Mars in Gemini comes up in the east-northeast well after midnight and is close to overhead at dawn. Jupiter sets before daybreak in Capricorn. Saturn in Virgo appears in the far west at sunset.

AUTUMN RESTLESSNESS

Readers of almanacs are, for the most part, domestic people; untamed nomads know their stars and seasons; they buy no statistics or predictions. It is the industrious but stationary middle class of town and country, not the free spirit, who has patronized the Poor Richards and Poor Wills and Poor Robins faithfully since the 17th century. 

Modern survival demands a sedentary expertise which must deny and mortify the migratory instinct. But that instinct goes deep, nonetheless. A twist in the weather can rouse it, September fogs, long flocks of blackbirds, harvest, frost, the turning leaves.

Geese always remind us we are pilgrims, even though they themselves winter over on our ponds. Quiet with their young through the summer, they suddenly take to the air at the end of August. The cry of a goose defines new responsibilities: the world to discover and remake.

Robins migrate south along the river valleys at the end of October; if you find their corridor, the flock seems prehistoric in dimension. And its sound evokes the collective past; it is the talk of the ancestors. The buzzards along the flyway hear it, wings spread to the sun, watching the infinite redbreasts. They know the world is still not too old or polluted, and that there is time left.

The trees send signals clear enough for any creature to understand. The canopy is gone, and now it is time for something else. There is a plain message in the drop of the last mulberry leaves. It is time to be off. The smell of decaying plants and fallen apples, and the short cool afternoons are universal words, and we understand them without the aid of mentors.

The fields are places for nostalgia now. There is a poignancy in the bloom of the last asters. They remind us what will happen to us. The end of the year tells the future simply enough. Against the fear of death or the fear of being left behind, migration seems to offer compensation.

If we join the flocks that follow their hearts purely, we will escape with them the predetermined advance of winter. Against the sadness at overwhelming change, we want to obey the higher laws of vagabondage, instead of the stiff, artificial constructs of society.

In the destruction of the garden by the frost, there is a loosening of bonds, a new freedom, and when the canopy is off the woodlot, it is easier to see beyond the black branches into the open sky south. Then the first light snow accelerates a sense of panic and excitement, and deepens the need to move on before it's too late.     

This is what Thoreau called the eleventh hour of the year, when we think about "the life we might have lived" had we followed the robin's flyway corridor, and we wonder about what Sir Thomas Browne said - that the world itself might be "in the wane," that "time may be too short for our designs."

But finally, in the quiet aftermath of December, we overcome the crisis, ignore it or deny it, reason, habit or economic necessity convincing us that in just three or four months it will be spring again, and that there is barely time to be ready.

We believe the almanack. The more ancient voice is suppressed, and we stay behind.