Memories of jumping in leaf piles
Are like the action of jumping
Into memory: edged shapes so light
The sharp pleasant scent
Composing myself amid total
Decomposition (meanwhile late
Fall’s upside down spring leaves
Reach the canopy of ground
And ever so slowly begin
The ascension to crown the roots)
In the daylight the wind in high branches
can at least be seen if not heard
In the spring it will regain its voice
the trees will put on their hands and applaud
Their applause is what we hear
The performance itself slips through ungrasped
Morning after the rain the creek
Brags its long story.
The breeze picks up
The chatter of leaves.
The maple shrugs about it
But in months to come it will
Shoulder a strongman’s
Burden of snow and ice.
My children race around
The trunk chasing the leaves that
whittle the air unpredictably
On their way to the ground
Sketching out for them their
Invisible future
One day they too will fall
Away from the family tree
Who will be running to catch
Them I wonder
12.
Midnight. In a corner of a room
a few days away, a half century crouches.
In the dark the corners of the years round up
certainty into the smooth black mast
against which direction flaps without words,
a trunk removed from its roots.
In the morning it is the maple and its shadow
unwinding along riverways of air and light.
The maple is old but the leaves always young,
the hours of the year, the half million
minutes through which we extend and end,
define the canopy of entirety itself by the shape
of what we miss. We shed time but are shaped by it;
wine on a quiet night, before crickets.
In a space under trees I can hear the wind that is not here
like a can kicked across the street by a boy still coming
or as if the act of the boy shaping his mouth to shout
made a sound before the sound of the shout
What is the word that I hear before the trees
above me shake and give the wind a momentary word
What is the sound of a loosening of leaves
like forgetting hands just before they drop
to our sides? The interval of apprehension.
The time we are alive. The boy stepping up the curb.
Shadows on the sidewalk of leaves in motion
above me are like the shadows of flames
the leaves are burning but the burn is slower it is a burn
we can inhabit or control are the leaves our days
how can we see it in the leaves still green and flexible
how can we see the beginning and end of it all in the shadows
how does the time difference work is it the same
when I send out words to you here in my midsummer
why do I feel the entirety of me burning
April leaves have given the wind a face and a voice
but not a body and not a will. Facing the headwind
Of great deeds and tragedies, I think we feel the same:
fear and awe at power without will, animating a hero.
The leaves were not laughing at me
(I could read their minds by floodlight)
In that perfect increment of night
when I loved the moment enough
For it to be my last they did not laugh
when I decreed it irreversible
In the barrel of empty air afloat
on the last black wave taking root
the leaves
did not laugh at me that
laughter was my own (by
floodlight they can read my mind)
An old white ash in the backyard of the abandoned house next door. It was a dry, cold, still day, weeks after the maple and walnut trees around it had lost their leaves but this tree still had hundreds which had not fallen, very large leaves bigger than your hands. I was out in my backyard with the dogs. With no cause such as a gust of wind and in the space of a few minutes, almost all the leaves of the ash tree fell to the ground. They were dry but heavy and dropped straight down like a bundle of mail or a suitcase, without the ceremony of wafting or drifting. As if the tree had just gotten the worst news in the world, perhaps that another tree it loved on the other side of the world had died, and dropped everything about itself onto its home’s floor that morning upon receiving the news. It was over in a hundred seconds. If I had not seen it I never would have noticed, or I would have noticed and not believed that something so sudden could have happened and thought simply Oh the ash tree finally lost its leaves while I was not paying attention. Not as if everything in the world had suddenly changed for it. In fact afterwards the tree essentially looked the same to me. I stood there a bit stunned watching those leaves fall, and then awhile longer watching the tree, still standing there, anticipating that it might shrug or even uproot itself and go marching off toward the mountain, but it looked unchanged to the rest of the world just as perhaps the rest of the world was now entirely foreign to it, and I remained there as rooted as anything in the yard, realizing how little we witness any of these moments in others, feeling that somewhere around the corner is a phone call or a letter or a conversation where we’ll each know exactly what it’s like to be that tree, and have the same chance to stay, rooted in what we most deeply are, unchanged to others even while dropping everything.
Twelve BellsTwelve bells. Middle of the middle of October’s night.
Leaves hanging on. They want you to remember
The shade they have provided, the sweet field
They made in the summer sky.
But everybody wants them to look like they will
When they have forgotten everything but dying.
Now in the dark, in the middle of the stirring
Season they can briefly mark
At once what we miss and anticipate:
The green whisper outside the window
That softened the dream of the world’s first cold wind
And when we rise to shut the window
Staring outward in that moment we
Have not yet realized has woken us,
The hard shadow in the moonlit sky already
Edged with the skitter and curl they’ll make
In November’s brown doldrums
Crossing the street with a weightless curse, never to come back.
Translations from the English 