Old Bricks

Poem No. 133

Cold nights this past week have really brought out autumn colors in our hills and trees. And I’m still in that busy phase I mentioned a few weeks ago. So, today I thought I’d share another poem (and post) I first shared when this newsletter was young. One of my favorite autumn poems:

---

---

Old Bricks

I wish to buy a house
of new brick
and live there with you
three hundred autumns

growing soft
and ivy-covered
losing edges
to the rain.

---

---

The idea of slow weathering by wind, water, and time has always had a romantic appeal for me — I love sea glass, bent trees, and old maps of the places rivers used to be. And I love the way weathered brick looks soft around the edges.

My poetry practice centers around editing — a type of erosion or weathering, I suppose. Sometimes the editing process can hang on a single word for a long time.

At first this poem read “a hundred autumns,” because it sounded poetic the day I wrote it. (You can read that first public version on my Instagram, signed with an old pen name. 😊) But the poem wasn’t true yet. If allowed, I would live with Petra until the stars burn out. A hundred years won’t cut it. So the poem drifted, over two years of editing, from “a hundred” to “five hundred” to “a thousand” to “ten thousand” to “for all of the autumns,” which… really wasn’t working poetically.

Eventually I realized the problem lay in the abstraction. The bigger the number, the more factual but less true. Less impactful. Empty of emotion, somehow.

But “three hundred autumns”?

For me, that one word — far too brief for the eternal heart, far too big for the mortal body — finally lets the poem say what it means.

I hope this finds most of you enjoying a cozy autumn, and the rest of you enjoying a beautiful spring. (I see you, my dozen or so subscribers from the southern hemisphere! 🙃❤️),
~ A

---

If you enjoyed this poem, please like, share, comment, and/or subscribe, all of which help to promote my work:

Or, for just $1, you can always:

---