Although I love fall, I also dread it, with its browning over of the green fields and its shorter days and its colder nights thrashing into winter.

I love winter, too, and I cheer up in January as the days get longer. But the many months of it in New England are trying.

So, we are still in summer, a summer that had a very long, cool beginning and lots of rain, so that my garden is not much to brag about. Of course, it never is, but it is usually better. I have puny green tomatoes so far, just a few red ripe ones.

Which, brings to mind a wonderful poem by Louise Gluck, in her Wild Iris collection. I believe that she is talking to God, whom she never names, but with titles of poems like Matins and Vespers, and the gist of them, that is certainly my interpretation. I’ve not read any others.

Vespers

By Louise Gluck

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.