Episodes 109-112 move us from summer to fall. In this episode we discuss the letting go and a grandmother's kazoo band.

Gathering word: The Consequences of Death by Pattiann Rodgers from Firekeeper: Selected Poems (2005) Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis.

You might previously have thought

Each death just a single loss.

But when a plain gray titmouse dies,

What plunges simultaneously and disappears too

Are all the oak-juniper woodlands,

The streamside cottonwoods, every elderberry

Bush and high spring growth of sprouted

Oak once held inside its eye.

And when a sugar pine splits, breaks

to the ground, falling with its fiestas

and commemorations of blue-green needles,

long-winged seeds, the sweet resin

of its heartwood, there’s another

collapse coincident - a fast inward

sinking and sucking back to nothing

of all those stars once kept in its core,

those clusters of suns and shining

dusts once resident in the sky of its rigid

bark and cone-scales. We could hear

the sound of the galactic collapse as well,

if we had the proper ears for it.

And when a mountain sheep stumbles,

plummets, catapulting skull, spine,

from cliffside to crumbling rock below,

a like shape of flame and intensidy

on a similar sharp ledge on the other side

of the same moment, out of our sense,

loses balance, goes blind.

Because of these torn paper-shreds

of gold-lashed wings, this spangled

fritillary’s death, somewhere behind the night

a convinced declaration of air and matter a

and intention, silenced, speaks no longer

of the god of its structure.