Last Love

Love at the closing of our days
is apprehensive and very tender.
Glow brighter, brighter, farewell rays
of one last love in its evening splendor.

Blue shade takes half the world away:
through western clouds alone some light is slanted.
O tarry, O tarry, declining day,
enchantment, let me stay enchanted.

The blood runs thinner, yet the heart
remains as ever deep and tender.
O last belated love, thou art
a blend of joy and of hopeless surrender.

-Fyodor Tyutchev

I remember when the horticultural staff at Denver Botanic Gardens would practically dance snow dances to hasten killing frost this time of year: they were so tired of dead-heading annuals, I suppose, and were waiting for...what? Death I suppose? Nothingness?

Winter may have it's threadbare appeal...but don't we have time enough for that? Although Tyutchev undoubtedly had an aging couples romance (rather like Antonio Machado's Guiomar poems)--love so deep, so tender that young love pales by comparison...It is a bit dramatic to say I feel that way about the growing season. But I do: they are predicting killing frost Tuesday night, and I shall drink in the banks of Salvia splendens I saw the other day on my commute with passionate ardor! A few glimpses of a few of Denver's terrific annual plantings around town (mostly torn out, I fear, by now...why are they in such a rush?)