In This Last Light

There’s a thirty-year-old poem by Mark Doty, entitled, “Four Cut Sunflowers, One Upside Down,” that’s always reminded me of autumn. The poem responds to Van Gogh’s famous still-life, already a hundred years old when Doty decided to encase it in poetic structure. The painting itself, of course, might remind anyone of autumn: it’s painted in hues of gold and orange and, with its flowers on the brink of decay, it appears that they have made it all the way through summer.

But the poem fixates on autumn as the eve of winter or, metaphorically, on our last vital gasp of life. “They are a whole summer to themselves,” writes Doty. “They are a nocturne/ in argent and gold, and they burn/ with the ferocity/ of dying (which is to say, the luminosity/ of what’s living hardest).” We tend to distill our love of autumn into the visual splendor and the evocative scent of the season. But it’s possible that it holds us so entirely in its grasp because it’s the last great gulp of unbridled spirit before the holidays come and go, before winter descends on us, and before we retreat back into our houses for another self-imposed repose. Because, of course, as Van Gogh and Doty convey insistently in their art, the intensity of life is defined by its inevitable demise. Van Gogh’s oils are so deep and thick, that each brushstroke feels like it’s the very essence of oxygen: sustaining, transformative, and on the verge of combustibility. Van Gogh was always terribly close to the edge of his own life - and many would argue that his experience is exactly what makes his paintings so dynamic. Doty certainly sees it, ending his own poem with this assessment: “In this last light, they are voracious.”

I know other people love the onset of spring, and some live for the sunlight of summer. But to me, no other time fills me with as much palpable energy as October in New England. The air changes as quickly as an infant does, shifting almost imperceptibly but profoundly, hour by hour. It’s all happening so fast, and with such vibrancy that even the maple leaf, swirling its way to the ground on the back of a breeze, feels like a miracle.

The point of all of this is not to get tied up in our own mortality; we certainly don’t need to rush that. But autumn does remind us - in its burning colors and smoldering scents - that we don’t have endless time to waste. The holidays will come and we will grasp each other tightly again, but these transitional months are daily reminders that life is progressing, and that there’s tremendous, almost immeasurable beauty in every stage of our evolution. We may not be able to hold onto it for long, but oh the joy of getting to feel the world spin, again.