Autumn Harvest - Wedding Poem

Sometimes Metaphor is the only way to say it.

I kept a close watch on the roses at the end of your row.

This post was originally conceived as a Medium Article. Click here for the original article or scroll down for additional commentary and context exclusive to this blog.

I found you on a sunny ridge overlooking the ocean. I had rested under a grove of pines, and when I awoke, you were there.

All that spring I watched you, and tended you. I knew that you were special. Leaves quiet enough to let the light come in, yet strong enough to repel the spiteful hail.

You opened longingly throughout the hot summer, the cicadas buzzing out your specialness to me. I ached, sometimes, at the thought that you might leave. I kept a close watch on the roses at the end of your row.

When it was time for you to be taken down, I scolded my hands. Be as kind as you can. I laid you gently into the presses, under the autumn sun. Nothing becomes lovely without some kind of pain, but still I turned the handle as slowly as I could. I only gave you what I could not suffer myself.

And I allowed you time. In the cellar under the old house, where the years move cool and slow. You slept there for many months, protected by the barrique walls.

Now, it is time. Now, my beloved. I have come for you, because you are ready now.

These are the only things I ask. Reveal to me your hidden things, as the years go by. Let further beauty fall from you, like the rain that brought you here. Let the garnet of your youth be made something more precious by age. Have the power to transform me, at the appointed time. Set my tongue free to utter witty things.

And come to me, to free me. You are the one who can truly raise me up.

P. Julian.

Wedding Day (Autumn) for A+K

Commentary/Context

This prose poem is important to me for a couple of reasons. The first is that I wrote it for the wedding of my lovely brother to his delightful wife, and in that context it received quite a lot of positive attention from family and friends.

The other reason this poem is important is that it was my very first breakthrough into my own style and authentic voice. Coming (like most such breakthroughs) with significant emotional release and I still can still feel the same powerful emotions when I read back over it today.

This poem is the first example of the style I now call hypnogogic prose, and it can also be seen as a strong precursor to the genre of New Scripture. What is surprising is that it came to me in 2002, the better part of a decade before my major breakthrough into New Scripture: my novella Lightbringer which I wrote in spring 2009.

When I wrote this poem I knew that it was beautiful and I knew that it moved me and I also knew that it moved other people but I could not have imagined the amount and quality of literary work that it foreshadowed.

The main difficulty is that this poem is of a size - 300 words or so - where people can easily access the rhythm of the language and the intensity of the emotion. As soon as I began turning this style towards novel-sized things people's comprehension dropped off sharply and I have never had any similar reaction from my family and friends.

Fortunately I am a writer of fiction, and in my work The Notebooks of Shaky Tom - a strange self-referential little piece I chucked down last year - I was able to imagine my dear brother reading this little work and writing me a letter foreshadowing his appreciation of my lengthier work to come.

I'll quote some of it here from that fictional letter to show you what I mean. My general advice connected with this would be: don't be ashamed to write down fictional letters from people you need to hear from, even if those people don't have the capacity - in their current incarnation - to send you the help you need.

So here it is.

I wonder whether you really comprehend this poem. Kitty keeps blushing and telling me how sensual it is, she comes away red-cheeked whenever she stops to read it. She doesn't know whether it's quite decent to have that kind of reaction to something her brother-in-law wrote, but I tell her what you told me about it: that in a very real sense you did not write this work… that along with our only favourite Ti Jean you said that this piece was dictated to you by the Holy Ghost.

(I usually put those claims down to you being self-deprecating but honestly brother in relation to this work I have no problem accepting this as the gospel truth)

What I want to know is: do you have any more of this kind of work in you? Or perhaps around you, surrounding you, might be a better way of asking. And to think this poem is just a few hundred words long, and how you now aspire to stretch that across a novel!

The heartbreak in that would be: most people can only tolerate this kind of brilliance in small tranches… if you gave them a novel made out of it they wouldn't have a hope of comprehending it.

No they wouldn't understand it at all and frankly brother I would put myself in that category: lacking the capacity (despite my best intentions) to accommodate this sort of work in any kind of volume.

But me being slow to understand something doesn't mean that you shouldn't write it. Because you would really be writing, if you wrote like that, not for any present time or or any present person but wholly for what they call posterity, and for that solely Posthumous Reputation you've often often told me is the only reputation worth having. Because a man celebrated for such work in his lifetime would be immediately divorced from the humility he needed to bring more such work into the world.

Be well brother. Ima gonna reach into the future and say: if nobody responds to or understands the things that you set down from now on it is because of the quality of the work and various shortfalls in their character. The failure in the apprehensive powers of any reader. Yes the shortfall will be in us… and sadly the world may become more profane before we turn that eventual corner, and strike out in reverence and humility towards a deep feeling for sacredness once more.

So that's it.

I don't know whether any of the above is true in a literal sense, and I make no claim to be able to rely upon the sentiments of these appraisals of the work that I have done. What I know is that having this fictional letter makes things easier. It helps to release my heart from various hard feelings and to restore me to the hope and joyous anticipation that a person really needs to write this sort of work.

P. Julian.