Leaf

What I was before the fallling leaf,
mongrel chaser of a sudden wind
whooshing through the trees a hint
all invisible alive that way went,
or maybe a breathless command
in taxis to “Follow that perfume!”
You know what I was, a way
the world could exclamation point,
the warm beating roof above
below the pounds of atmosphere,
wild enough to make rebel women safe,
with a pool hall pose of hustler grace
and the sly summmoning of exit signs.
God help me, earth got disappeared
below the concrete and asphalt,
buried dead, nature already extinct
by my teenage years, happy to claw
away at classroom walls, barlight,
interstate horizons, truck cabs,
factory timeclocks, turns 1, 2, 3 & 4
of Central Valley dirt tracks, grey
fabric fencing of the office cubicles,
and all my unstable pals, freedom
their secret love amidst the beard
of recklessness, inattentive at best
to the policies, the rules, the signs.
Decades rolled, ice blocks in a spring river,
and I’m making it clear to a new sales guy
across a satanic cherry wood table,
a room papered in drycleaned faces,
that 2.7% won’t cut it any more, man.
Yes, I got enough purchasing power,
where, hell, I could buy my brains out.
But, get me deep into the woods
and I can’t tell you what I won.
As I flutter and feather from tree limb
to dank and decomposing forest floor,
an autumn leaf in litterfall, I see
how I turn life obsessively to words,
the way a math professor reduces
all his scenery to numbers,
Yet, I still can’t read or speak
to tell you what is happening
in the native language of the world.
I mean, I think I saw the word for torch
in a tree back east in fall.
I saw a yellow butterfly surely meant
to punctuate a sentence somewhere.
The Tetons are shouting something out.
The Rockies are Encyclopedia books!
But I was arrogant...diagrammed
everything out, only to find you can’t
understand a frog splayed across a tabletop
for dissection as much as listening to him talk.
Born knowing what’s now a foreign tongue,
with syntax strange enough to have floated
down from Mars, I grew deaf and dumb.
Even time doesn’t work as I defined it.
Forever comes in moments you forget
your death, or decide it doesn’t matter.
Love is the lightest leash of the lord.
We hear beneath the avalanche
the calling warmth of sun,
but fail to make our way,
the crush and the cold,
womb and tomb,
is where we choose
to huddle and stay
one more day.