Gentians for Carole
in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.
—D. H. Lawrence, Bavarian Gentians
Slow, sad September, soft, and yes, still sad.
Not every house has autumn flowers,
and I have never seen a gentian with my living eyes.
Did you?—like Lawrence, dizzied by the blue
and spinning in his words?
The blue, repeating blues, the smoking dark;
the burning blue of Dis he muses on so long,
his darkened-on-blueness blue.
Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!
Light-seeker, Sun-searcher, sluicing off
the carbon black: south, east, west,
whichever place the compass gifts him heat.
No wonder he reached for gentians then,
roots plumbing shades that echo Pluto-deep
but offering fields of late-year light.
I hear the wind up on high meadows,
rippling through grass, the mountain lungs
wide-studded with a swooning blue.
Blue balm to the eyes
and on the tongue,
the healing bitter of gentian root.
We have been together in those dark halls,
absorbing our Autumn news
in frosted September’s chill.
Each one of us, some time, Persephone,
but grateful for colour, light
and meadow flowers
late into bittersweet Fall.
In Nottingham, barefoot, he’s always holding one.
Your ashes found the soil around Spring crocuses.
Give us such torch-flowers to see us through the days—
the hot-white blur and daze of racing life,
the softly rising mist of violet hours.
i.m. Carole Rae Blake
29 September 1946–25 October 2016
Lines from “Bavarian Gentians” by D. H. Lawrence in “Gentians for Carole” are from The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: The Poems edited by Christopher Pollnitz, © Cambridge University Press 2013. Reproduced by permission of Paper Lion Ltd, The Estate of Frieda Lawrence Ravagli and Cambridge University Press.