Leaves

photo courtesy of flickr user Mike O'C

Leaves
by Lloyd Schwartz

1

Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it's about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself—
the trees don't die, they just pretend,
go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

2

Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far
enough away from home to see not just trees
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks
like rain, or snow, but it's probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the
most color last year, but it doesn't matter since
you're probably too late anyway, or too early—
whichever road you take will be the wrong one
and you've probably come all this way for nothing.

3

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll
remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
or something you've felt that also didn't last.

Home

Sokolov, Czech Republic, 2007

Home
by Bruce Weigl

I didn't know I was grateful
for such late-autumn
bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
sun before the
cold plow turns it all over

into never.
I didn't know
I would enter this music

that translates the world
back into dirt fields
that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
come from the dirt,
like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
and unraveling strangeness.

Recent ones.

twisted lily, summer 2008

Two poems from a college classmate.

Recent ones
by Esther Shaver


A tree that had lost a very small branch
cried to the earth that life was unfair.
The earth gave comfort and, in time,
the branch scarred over and the tree healed.
The earth smiled to herself
at the small wisdom of the tree
and grasped her great clefts and rifts
and tried to close them.
And peace there was for a while.
But then the tree was made into a gun.
And greater rifts were cut to find
the heart of the earth.
And the earth wept for the days
when she had had time to close rifts great
and clefts small;
when peace, though broken by war, could be restored again.
And then, a tree that had lost a very small branch
cried to the earth that life was pain...



Two sides of this coin,
leading to 'myself' and 'the wide world'
Taken each by themselves
I find flat and unknown respectively
But taken together,
I am filled with the world
And the world has meaning to one small person.
Ambiguity and mystery
fail time and again
to discover this knowing, paradox eternal.
I cannot contain the world,
and the world cannot be valid
except there be those like me to accept its being.
It's a lonely fate, being human:
Called to live
until all else fails.
And driven to communicate
until veritable intercourse is needed.
Curses be for the willfully lonely.