

For a review of the performance go here to Marie Gullard in the Washington Examiner.
My sense of the evening was that I had been in church or synagogue, in the best senses of those words. Sample played possessed by the power of the Yamaha and the artery that flowed from his heart. It is heart that we heard in those fabulous old hands that have not aged on the keyboard. It is spirit that we heard in his words. He chatted between songs and I did not take notes. I was enthralled. My memory of what he said:
That when he looked for money for what he did, it didn’t come. When he did what he needed to do, it did. That he doesn’t know who or how many remember him but that he lives this music: He once beat his piano in anger at age six when his parents made him play it. Little did he know that he was beating up the source of who he is. That he’s on tour at age 71 while he’s taking Coumadin; thus, without knowing it perhaps, he brought the heart into the conversation, as he admitted that some times his memory of what he’ll play next is off. Not true. The ingenuousness of the comment hit the mark the way his hands hit the keys.
And I recalled that John Donne said in one of his sermons, “In heaven it is always autumn.” Here is a bit of that line in context:
God hath made no decree to distinguish the seasons of his mercies; in Paradise, the fruits were ripe the first minute, and in heaven it is always autumn, his mercies are ever in their maturity.
Joe Sample lives in that autumn. He plays in that season and the mercies come to those who listen. He led me further than I’d been.
Elizabeth Spires, took Donne’s line for the title of a poem she wrote for her friend and mentor Josephine Jacobsen:
“In Heaven It Is Always Autumn”
—John Donne
In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven's path no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven's calm, they take each other's arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down, the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that's said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds
pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we're here, I think it must be heaven.
—Elizabeth Spires from Now the Green Blade Rises
When I read this poem and all the poems in this beauty of a book, I wrote to Spires, a long letter about the poems. This last poem reaches a climactic height of both beauty, meaning and the wisdom of autumn.
Here is what I told her in the close of that letter:
I shall always know what you have written and shall seek your work forevermore, for in this book, Elizabeth Spires, “… you have led me farther than I have ever been.”

In the autumn of my life, I know that heaven and life are one and that I live that heaven each day. And that, as Martin Buber says, “All real living is meeting.”
This is beautiful Mary. Thank you for the post.
ReplyDeleteI love autumn and I love listening to live jazz.
Thanks...I love what Joe Sample said about money: "That when he looked for money for what he did, it didn’t come. When he did what he needed to do, it did. That he doesn’t know who or how many remember him but that he lives this music..."
ReplyDeleteNeeded, timely encouragement for me.
Dear Susan,
ReplyDeleteYour taking the time to write, let alone to read, gives me hope.
Thank you,
Mary
Helen,
ReplyDeleteIt is so good to know that I have written something here that provided encouragement. I wrote it because that is what I received from these three souls who grace the world.
Thank you for continuing to visit my blog, for reading me, for writing me and for writing your work, your essays and your poems,
Mary
HI Mary,
ReplyDeleteWhat a beautiful post! Autumn, poetry and jazz just seem to make an excellent fit! It's so interesting to read about the people who have influenced and inspired you and your writing. And you tell us about it so well!
Dear Kate,
ReplyDeleteTo receive a direct comment from you, whose blog I read often--is there a way to follow it?--means much to me.
Also, you are perceptive here in seeing that what I was actually doing in this entry was discussing the writing process, my personal journey in that process and how the work is evoked. I use the passive voice here because I don't know where the work comes from when it comes well, when it truly works--and that experience as Theodore Roethke has described in the writing of the poem, "Dance," is more unearthly than one might think but ever and ever based on the reading, the thinking, "unearthing" the form of what others do so much better than I. He says he was teaching Yeats and the five-beat line when the poem finally "came" when he thought he was "done."
Mary
Mary
Gorgeous post. Autumn has always been my favourite season but I had never come across that line of Donne before. Thank you for all that.
ReplyDeleteHello, Mary! Clearly, we are living a great mystery on this planet ... and the seeking is joyful! Getting to "knowing" is a bit more difficult, complicated, but via music, poetry, and magical connections ... "pieces of knowing" are created. Slices of heaven, perhaps.
ReplyDeleteHave a lovely autumn day! Daisy @ SunnyRoomStudio
Dear Fictionwitch,
ReplyDeleteI find Donne's sermons to be more inspiring than much of the poetry that I also once loved, still do but now see the prose as more powerful. Little do some know, for example that this famous excerpt, that Hemingway must have read and used an excerpt for the title of his novel _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ is from Donne's Meditation XII: "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if the promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
Thank you for taking the time to comment here, for visiting this blog, fr staying in touch and for doing the work you are doing on your site.
Mary
Dear Daisy,
ReplyDeleteFinding you as I have written about on this blog is an affirmation for me of the love in the universe. As you know, because you have given me the gift of reading my memoir (Re)Making Love: a sex after sixty story that is now a book, I quote late in the memoir physicist and Jungian analyst John L. Hitchcock from a book I hold dear. Here's the quote I use in the memoir: John L. Hitchcock in his book At Home in the Universe: Re-envisioning the Cosmos with the Heart, says:
"This book is a declaration of love. It is not a declaration of my love, but of the fact that love is the heart of the universe. . . . [I]t is we who submit to the bonds of love. And since love sets its object free—since love is the very basis of our freedom—in submitting to its bonds, we also set free whomever or whatever is the object of our love. In a profound sense . . . submitting to the bonds of love can help release even God. We can love reality as it is, though it seems to throw obstacles in our way and wound us."
I share this with you again, to reaffirm our connection through your decision to not only read my book--I am a complete stranger to you--but also to help me get news out about the book and because we have come to know each other through each other's writings. That gift of meeting that I reaffirm in this short essay above is YOU.
Fondly,
Mary
Mary, what a thoughtful, generous passage ... you are a kindred spirit with such a gift for words and wisdom! Here's my take on how we come to recognize kindred spirits ... to quote Eckhart Tolle "Stillness Speaks" pg. 126 ...
ReplyDelete"To know another human being in their essence, you don't really need to know anything about them -- their past, their history, their story. We confuse knowing about with a deeper knowing that is nonconceptual. Knowing about and knowing are totally different modalities. One is concerned with form, the other with the formless. One operates through thought, the other through stillness."
So, even though we've never met, I sense there is a deeper knowing ... that is open to all of us, really ... a sense of "recognition" that occurs almost spontaneously. We are all of "one spirit" ... :)
A joy to know you; will be great to have you as my guest in SunnyRoomStudio October 1st -- see you then! Namaste. --Daisy
So glad I checked my messages today. Such a beautiful post. Wish I could have heard the musician who said "That when he looked for money for what he did, it didn’t come. When he did what he needed to do, it did." Amen to that. Beautiful!
ReplyDelete