" . . . the melancholy decline of the year, "

In the Hour before Dusk, by BJ Omanson.  (Monongahela Books, 2024).  Illustrated.  75 pp.  

After half a century of work in the naturalistic narrative mode of Hardy, Robinson and Frost, Omanson returns to his aesthetic origins-- to that long period in English poetry from late-18th century Gothic to the late Victorians-- to contemplate once more the mesmerizing vistas of his youth from the more philosophical vantage of old age.

from "Old Locksley among the Ruins":

.                             It was later that year,
after weeks when the heat of midsummer
had driven Old Locksley to seek the shade,
had driven him, like a disgruntled bear,
to take sanctuary deep in his house,
deep in the cavernous gloom of his house,
with bats in the attic and dripping eaves
and high steepled windows where mystics, monks
and martyrs shone softly in sunlit glass—
it was later that year, after summer’s heat
had driven Old Locksley into the hushed
recesses and curtained-off rooms of his house—
a house that was more a cavern than house,
with ivy-encumbered and blackened stone
and deeply-set doorways encased in vine—
or more like a mausoleum, perhaps,
with its bordering arbor vitae and yew—
with crumbling foundation and groaning pipes
and crickets in corners, its redolent rooms
provisioned with humidors of tobacco
and crystal decanters of peaty scotch,
its snug little hideaways fitted out
with old leather sofas and mica lamps
enveloped in amber light—  it was later,
much later that year that Locksley, at last,
emerged amid whirlings of leaves released
from willow and maple to clutter the air
all about his head and skitter across
the garden to lodge in the lower boughs
of the conifers—  it was later that year
that Locksley returned to his garden seat,
returned to consider and contemplate
the melancholy decline of the year,
the shedding of gold and of crimson leaves,
the dropping of berries and migrating flocks
of sparrows in spruces, and all the subtle
foreshadowings of the coming cold . . .

. . . . . . 

For Autumn to Locksley was no mere bridge
of transient days linking summer's close
to the snows of winter— in Locksley's mind,
Old Autumn was less a condition of time
than of place—  it was less a recurrent phase
embracing the earth for a day, than a place
of endless ending through which the Earth moved
as a ship through a shifting sea, a region
unalterable in its alteration,
immutable as the mutable moon.

~~~~~

Note: the poem "Old Locksley among the Ruins" was originally issued as a separate book (Old Locksley among the Ruins, Monongahela Books, 2021), which has since gone out of print and can no longer be ordered.  However, "Old Locksley . . ." is currently the final poem in the collection In the Hour before Dusk  (Monongahela Books, 2021), pp. 59-73.