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Another Kind of Autumn
New poems, published posthumously, by the distinguished anthropologist, naturalist, and poet reaffirm the unity of Creation, the importance of all living beings, and the wonders of ancient civilizations.
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1977
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About the author
Loren Eiseley
50 books314 followersLoren Corey Eiseley (September 3, 1907 – July 9, 1977) was a highly respected anthropologist, science writer, ecologist, and poet. He published books of essays, biography, and general science in the 1950s through the 1970s.
Eiseley is best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay". He used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. He is also known for his writings about humanity's relationship with the natural world; these writings helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
Eiseley is best known for the poetic essay style, called the "concealed essay". He used this to explain complex scientific ideas, such as human evolution, to the general public. He is also known for his writings about humanity's relationship with the natural world; these writings helped inspire the modern environmental movement.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 25, 2020
Written at the end of his life, and filled with looking back in metaphors that appealed to my geological and natural senses. Driving home from Utah and the Grand Canyon this week, I witnessed a giant plume of smoke from Colorado wildfires and had a primal feeling I needed to flee since it looked like an erupting volcano, and he has a poem about a volcano that I read afterwards so the coincidence is chilling.
Knossos
they died in one night/the pillars of the palace buckling/great stones cast down, the galleys/ beached on the shore, ruin and ashes/assailing men from the sky.//Thera, the burst throat of the world coughing fire and brimstone/its voice like the bellowing of a loosed god./We have known it all our lives-/the fear of the moving atoms, but they endured/ the actual megaton explosion/ and their remnants faded from history.
Another Kind of Autumn
This petrified branch with the harsh look whose mineralized
Splinters are needle sharp
Was living a hundred million years ago,
Bent to invisible wind, put out leaves on the mountain.
Today
The mountain is gone and this fragment
Iies on my desk imperishable and waits for me in turn
To be gone.
This hand that writes
Stiffens, but has no such powers, no crystalline absorption
To hold a pen through eons while slow thought gutters
From lichen-green boulders and pinnacles.
Ink will congeal and perish, the pen rust into its elements,
The thought here, the realization of time, perish
With the dissolving brain. It appears that the universe
Likes the seams of the coal, the lost leaf imprinted in shale,
The insect in amber, but thought it gives to the wind
Like the season’s leaf fall. Where is the wind that shaped
This branch?
It perhaps still moves in the air, but the branch has fallen.
Its unfamiliar leaves are now part of my body
And I let the pen drop from my hand, thinking
This is another kind of autumn to be expected.
Leaves and thoughts are scarcely returnable. The wind
Loses them
Or one remains in the shale like an unread hieroglyph
Once meaningful in clay.
The Aboriginals
They lived another way of life here:
Time was different.
Time dreamed here, time dreamed itself
Withdrawn from time, a dream time where men and animals
Walked softly…
The perpetual autumn.
Why could not life have gone on forever in the autumn country?
Why did those others who came with sails
Through the Great Barrier Reef
Have to awaken and destroy the world,
The unseen necessary balance?
Why? Why?
Wind Child
They have just found where Monarch butterflies go
In autumn
Those red-gold drifters edged in black
That blow like leaves but never
Quite coming to rest,
Always fluttering,
A little out of reach,
Disappearing
Over the next house or just making it
Above the hedge…
Where is the compass?
We don’t know.
How did the habit start?
We don’t know.
Why do they gather in great clumps on trees
In the Sierra Madre?
We don’t know.
They are individualists. They fly alone. Who wouldn’t
In autumn like to rock and waver
Southward like an ever blowing leaf
Over and through forests and hedges
Floats in the glades
Sip the last nectar?
Fly Falcon
All of the falcon kind, the hard travelling
Talon-clawed ones
That for so many years I have seen
Go over Hawk Mountain on thousand-mile journeys-
At heart I go with them, but I also travel
With the fluttering Monarch butterflies.
Toss on gales lost at sea, or cross the Gulf
With hummingbirds.
You think this is impossible? Not with the mind’s eye
My friend
The ever widening eye
Of the living world, the eye that someday
Will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
The eye
At the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
Arms of the suns about it.
Fly falcon, fly Monarch, fly gull,
and you in the invisible night-tiger’s eye
going somewhere in reed grass. I am there
paddling softly with you, fly albatross
that sleeps on the Cape Horn winds. We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy
we make it real.
Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
Stare that the universe may find itself living
Beyond the immortal fires.
Deserts creep/poles shift/continents slide like dinner plate/under out feet./ I wonder what final messages/in fear or wisdom/what muttered static/troubled the listeners…he is going quietly/ singing this small song to join/the wind’s voices…
The cacti are neutral but aware of the world/in a dreamer’s fashion…They are another planet’s offspring/or better say, the desert’s world./ It is not apparent matter/if they live or die, dreaming dark soundless dreams/ of a life not our life, dreaming as one might suspect/ a desert to dream…
I know now what impulse created the Olmec heads/Mayan stelae and Machu Picchu./ The stone will survive us. Like the Old Ones I have left/ a shaped stone in the gravel./ It is all my knowledge. It will lie there when earth’s perturbed orbit /drifts towards the final dark/We loved the earth/but could not stay?/We it was and not the immortals/ who shaped the stones.
Dreamed in a Dark Millennium
Dreamed in a dark millennium I did not live
In human time, but rather was a crawling landscape of eons,
Boulders gouged out, great canyons scarred my face,
Mesas of thought were heaped on me by winds,
And all that time amidst light, darkness, desert rains,
I lived and dreamed some planetary dream.
Myself, old earth-father…
Beauty then
Out of the stones and slashes and just at the edge of morning, light.
Stretched in my bed, my giant continental bed, I sighed.
Having glimpsed man, some way within myself, and wept,
Wept for what it was he strove for, for what he lost,
Could not attain, wept,
In the cold morning, but joyed again to live, in the half light,
Before daylight came.
Only remember when you give such love/to mountain freshets or to trees that fall/you give yourself past every human shape/and nothing is recallable…
Knossos
they died in one night/the pillars of the palace buckling/great stones cast down, the galleys/ beached on the shore, ruin and ashes/assailing men from the sky.//Thera, the burst throat of the world coughing fire and brimstone/its voice like the bellowing of a loosed god./We have known it all our lives-/the fear of the moving atoms, but they endured/ the actual megaton explosion/ and their remnants faded from history.
Another Kind of Autumn
This petrified branch with the harsh look whose mineralized
Splinters are needle sharp
Was living a hundred million years ago,
Bent to invisible wind, put out leaves on the mountain.
Today
The mountain is gone and this fragment
Iies on my desk imperishable and waits for me in turn
To be gone.
This hand that writes
Stiffens, but has no such powers, no crystalline absorption
To hold a pen through eons while slow thought gutters
From lichen-green boulders and pinnacles.
Ink will congeal and perish, the pen rust into its elements,
The thought here, the realization of time, perish
With the dissolving brain. It appears that the universe
Likes the seams of the coal, the lost leaf imprinted in shale,
The insect in amber, but thought it gives to the wind
Like the season’s leaf fall. Where is the wind that shaped
This branch?
It perhaps still moves in the air, but the branch has fallen.
Its unfamiliar leaves are now part of my body
And I let the pen drop from my hand, thinking
This is another kind of autumn to be expected.
Leaves and thoughts are scarcely returnable. The wind
Loses them
Or one remains in the shale like an unread hieroglyph
Once meaningful in clay.
The Aboriginals
They lived another way of life here:
Time was different.
Time dreamed here, time dreamed itself
Withdrawn from time, a dream time where men and animals
Walked softly…
The perpetual autumn.
Why could not life have gone on forever in the autumn country?
Why did those others who came with sails
Through the Great Barrier Reef
Have to awaken and destroy the world,
The unseen necessary balance?
Why? Why?
Wind Child
They have just found where Monarch butterflies go
In autumn
Those red-gold drifters edged in black
That blow like leaves but never
Quite coming to rest,
Always fluttering,
A little out of reach,
Disappearing
Over the next house or just making it
Above the hedge…
Where is the compass?
We don’t know.
How did the habit start?
We don’t know.
Why do they gather in great clumps on trees
In the Sierra Madre?
We don’t know.
They are individualists. They fly alone. Who wouldn’t
In autumn like to rock and waver
Southward like an ever blowing leaf
Over and through forests and hedges
Floats in the glades
Sip the last nectar?
Fly Falcon
All of the falcon kind, the hard travelling
Talon-clawed ones
That for so many years I have seen
Go over Hawk Mountain on thousand-mile journeys-
At heart I go with them, but I also travel
With the fluttering Monarch butterflies.
Toss on gales lost at sea, or cross the Gulf
With hummingbirds.
You think this is impossible? Not with the mind’s eye
My friend
The ever widening eye
Of the living world, the eye that someday
Will see all as one, the eye of the hurricane,
The eye
At the heart of the galaxy with the spinning
Arms of the suns about it.
Fly falcon, fly Monarch, fly gull,
and you in the invisible night-tiger’s eye
going somewhere in reed grass. I am there
paddling softly with you, fly albatross
that sleeps on the Cape Horn winds. We are all
the terrible eye that sees the galaxy
we make it real.
Without us multiplied, what really exists?
Fly falcon, stare tiger in the night grass,
Stare that the universe may find itself living
Beyond the immortal fires.
Deserts creep/poles shift/continents slide like dinner plate/under out feet./ I wonder what final messages/in fear or wisdom/what muttered static/troubled the listeners…he is going quietly/ singing this small song to join/the wind’s voices…
The cacti are neutral but aware of the world/in a dreamer’s fashion…They are another planet’s offspring/or better say, the desert’s world./ It is not apparent matter/if they live or die, dreaming dark soundless dreams/ of a life not our life, dreaming as one might suspect/ a desert to dream…
I know now what impulse created the Olmec heads/Mayan stelae and Machu Picchu./ The stone will survive us. Like the Old Ones I have left/ a shaped stone in the gravel./ It is all my knowledge. It will lie there when earth’s perturbed orbit /drifts towards the final dark/We loved the earth/but could not stay?/We it was and not the immortals/ who shaped the stones.
Dreamed in a Dark Millennium
Dreamed in a dark millennium I did not live
In human time, but rather was a crawling landscape of eons,
Boulders gouged out, great canyons scarred my face,
Mesas of thought were heaped on me by winds,
And all that time amidst light, darkness, desert rains,
I lived and dreamed some planetary dream.
Myself, old earth-father…
Beauty then
Out of the stones and slashes and just at the edge of morning, light.
Stretched in my bed, my giant continental bed, I sighed.
Having glimpsed man, some way within myself, and wept,
Wept for what it was he strove for, for what he lost,
Could not attain, wept,
In the cold morning, but joyed again to live, in the half light,
Before daylight came.
Only remember when you give such love/to mountain freshets or to trees that fall/you give yourself past every human shape/and nothing is recallable…
January 27, 2021
More lovely free verse poetry from the incomparable naturalist, essayist and poet. This slim volume contains a sampling of Mr. Eiseley's quirky, often brooding, reflections. As fans would know, a lot of his essays are crafted so well they probably could be formatted as poetry and not be challenged. Probably few today would seek this (or his other collections of poems) out, but if you do, you won't regret it.
April 2, 2023
I admired Eiseley since reading him in college. But I am new to his poetry. I finished this a week ago traveling and don't recall specifics about this volume except his comparison to failing memory and a sinking ship is exceptional! And one of the opening poems about writing, connecting his thoughts today with a man in Sumer a millennium ago. Poems folded over a scientific view of the world is a winning combination for me.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews