Tony Whedon: Field of Vision | Blues and Greens

Between this and that, my wife, my dear little cowslip,

was misdiagnosed with heart failure and everything I loved

lost its pigment. The old reds weren’t red anymore,

the rose bushes on the path by the river had lost their pink

and birds I’d rarely seen before emerged from their summer sleep

to languish in the maples behind our house. Grief

teaches us nothing, Emerson, in one of his moods, tells us,

but I learned a lot from the sadness blossoming around me.

Wherever I cast my gaze the world was ravished by stillness,

and I learned to abide the absence of color in my life

and to see myself as separate from my moving parts.

My wife lived on in the end, regaining her prodigious health,

and a few worthy apothegms stayed with me in the aftermath

of my grief. Behold, the month of September again this year,

again the violent blue of the late-summer asters.

Tony Whedon’s essay collection A Language Dark Enough  won the Mid-List Press Award. He lives in Vermont.

Copyright 2020 Tony Whedon

Aster