Season's End
It’s Labor Day weekend here at the Jersey shore, summer’s last hurrah. The beach is packed with people, and Southside Johnny will be performing at the Stone Pony Summer Stage, rescheduled from the 4th of July concert that got rained out, when we still got rain here. For me, however, summer ends on September 21 or Yom Kippur, whichever is later. This year I got lucky.
Though I am ready for a change of season. I appreciated the cool air during my morning walk to the farmer’s market, and I was happy to see the first of the apples. A lot of the local schools have already opened for the year.
To not take up too much of your time during the long weekend, I’ll close with my poem, “Labor Day” from my collection Cutting Room (Terrapin Books), a reminder of what this weekend is about, and hope your summer was all you wanted it to be.
Labor Day These hydrangea have turned all the colors of autumn. Each an eye focused on the sofa, front door, coffee table, and the window on the lake where the sky drips melting beads into the water. The flowers dry in an antique blue vase of hand-blown glass. My fondness now tempered, knowing before unions, labor laws or machinery, children stoked kiln fires, sorted colored sand. Local boys who might have gone to school or played hooky and went swimming, worked more cheaply than men, took ill, died young. The flowers and I take refuge not far from Glassboro, Millville, Clementon and Clayton whose crucibles cooled decades ago, and when glory holes closed with them went the artisans who blew hot glass into pitchers and bowls, bottles and doorknobs, who sheered and tweezed frills into petals and leaves, none exactly like another, each defect, each craze, each variation sharing a secret of origin like the wind stung hydrangea blossoms crouching over the low retaining wall surrounding Wesley Lake. Labor Day evening, all the glass streetlamp globes are reflected in the water like little suns. Even loneliness seems a kind of joy. Fireworks arc and ashes cascade. A light drizzle dances on the pavement.