It might seem precipitous to think already of the end of summer, when in so many places August is blazing away, the heat laughing at our hope that it will break. But the contemporary formalist poet Jane Greer — author of “Love Like a Conflagration” and the forthcoming “The World as We Know It Is Falling Away,” from which today’s Poem of the Day is taken — makes her home in North Dakota. The closer you live to the Arctic Circle, the more fleeting your summer days become. When Robert Frost wrote “Nothing gold can stay,” he was thinking of the first barely green spring leaves. Here, in a twelve-line pentameter poem with an abcabc rhyme scheme, the glory of a late-summer day on the great plains proclaims its own transience.  

The Last Warm Saturday 
by Jane Greer 

The last warm Saturday, the final mowing — 
that drone, that fragrance — with the traitor sun 
low-angled, making all this not quite right. 
Here is a bitter yearly winnowing 
of what’s to come from what is in decline, 
parsed in the language of the changing light. 

I know this language but I cannot speak it. 
I learned it from my senses, over time. 
It warms me and it makes me cold and mute. 
In trying to express its deepest secret, 
all I can mumble is its paradigm: 
that loss and bliss come from the same root. 

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.