One Less Leaf

(auras of all my autumns)

I

One less leaf, though a loss, is no cause for grief,

Not when so many still cling tightly to their twigs 

Like all things cling to Life, or like Life to all things,

(Being, once begun, unwilling to leave off its ing…)

And will for weeks, or months, till chill Winter- its sting

Worse than any bee’s- strikes ice into every being.

II

When, at ten, I saw that one fall, I was appalled that no great cable   

Was able to uphold my one whole world- when all it depended on,  

By a tension I never saw, was dissolved; and, if not the first

Fall of all, I’ll call it the first attention caught- or, I ought to say,

That caught attention (in that way); being much older today, I’m consoled

Knowing I no more caused that event than falling leaves lead to autumn; I know

No more did my thoughts at ten than my ten fingers stem that life back then,

Though for a time I asked if any thought of mine had brought about the end

(As if that playful saying ‘step on a crack, break your mother’s back’ hid a fact,

And that not just an act but a thought of something dark- perhaps some loss-

Made it come to pass, Fate or Force making concrete the break, or worse).

III

One may foresee something is soon to be seized, still all

Who believe, having lived long among leaves, that to augur   

A leaf’s fall amid any autumn is to cause what’s inevitable  

Are fools who forget in any set there’s a first before a next;

That in her vast harvest- her deadly series- Ceres, or Death,

(Not to spread heresies, but none is spared their last breath)

Must begin somewhere; and to fear your fear foreshadows-

Makes into gallows every tree you see in hollow or meadow-

Or is a summons to the reaper to appear here and now shows how, 

As a season is the sun’s reflection so guilt may be grief’s offspring,

Merely some son or daughter, as spring, summer and autumn are of winter

(From which all forms for a season shall flower or flourish before perishing).

IV

Some insist that only in our heads do laws of cause and effect exist,

That what, at any rate, we see apart we have separate set; whether or not,

I suspect that set Life-and-Death can never be shed, rushed or ushered out

Or in by wish or fear, or mere will or whim, any more than those two

Do the works of nature’s undoing given to the duo of wind and winter-

Twins that dwindle, strip life from limb, make each tree a living victim

(Not to make all life and a little leaf akin in gravity, still it’s bitter for me

To witness this bleeding of blended colors and all ended in whiteness).

V

Each autumn we watch fall all these leaves as breezy air or freezing blasts

Breathe forth either as wraiths in their wrath, or, more serenely,    

As wind-winged angels that reap by lulling-to-sleep; but whether  

They writhe under wetness and weather, or drop as a downy feather

Down to earth to mix with the dirt, all that have, like every man, had birth,

Breath and growth breathe their last and mantle the earth- the season  

Seizing on each leaf in turn, leaving at our feet wreathes for fair warning.

VI

How different back then when I knew nothing of urns or purgings- when burning

Was autumn leaves all aglow, oak in stoves, Jack-o’-lanterns and bonfire haloes;

When I, a boy in the throes and throbs of his heart’s joy, happy as any lad or lass,

Into a leafy mass would leap and laugh, not knowing, owing to that happy nature

Nature bestows as if to capture us with the raptures of our gladdest hours

(Hours- alas- as fragile as glass, lasting less time than does dew upon grass),  

What was to pass in a not-far-future, moments and movements,

As it were, of November into December- until the final rupture

No amount of nurture or reassurance, touch or words, can cure…

Such, however, are the forebodings of the more mature or morbid

Heaven forbids most children, few having that turn for metaphor-

Other than (maybe) making loveliest leaves to pass as topaz or rubies-

Nor eyes to read leaves as runes, ruins-to-be, beauties Time buries.

VII

By no boy’s sleight-of-sight or trick-of-Mind did my first one dive

Down to die; I, unwilling as unwitting, was but some stander-by,

A boy who, while enlivened by spirit, didn’t see beyond the body;

Likewise, by no will or hoping against hope will it up and float, as though

Through some immature Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland notion or other

Mother Nature would choose to revoke those laws of loss and leave to me

Or anything else a longer lease (age in my life, like in leaf, seen in creases),

As if one less, though the best of blessings to me, were any real increase

In creation; I had asked variations on the question, Does a tree make a sound  

If no ear is near to hear it fall (as well may I have asked what hearing

There would be if it never fell at all, or how many trees create a wood,

When do saplings pass into trees, what precedes, the tree or the seed?)-

Asked what reaction, what joy there would be in not longing, in not losing

A thing you’re long used to loving, believe will never cease, will always be living

(I suppose a son at ten can ponder over love and loss no less than Tennyson).

VIII

If I hold out an ounce of hope (as I once did as that boy only a decade old,

Buoyed by the belief or lie a boy may buy back what’s decayed or gone)

I’ll prevent even a single fall I’ll recall what many falls taught me long ago:

Whether life’s autumn-long or spring-brief, another world awaits every being

That can bud, bloom or a blossom bear, can bleed, blink or breathe the air…   

What strips all things like the wind does wig-wearing trees branch-and-twig

Is Time, a sort of storm so big I worried (hardly when a tender boy of ten,

But then by eleven or twelve, more often) Heaven ended its Genesis-promise

To not swallow all life alive till not one leaf, olive or otherwise (nor I), survives…

(I’ve since read how a dove-like, divine love watches over every swallow

That rises or dives, is with each creature while it lives, even after it dies).    

IX

Be it birch, beech, maple, apple, aspen, ash, elm, plum, gum, hickory

Or oak, among any others one looks to to shed robe, cape, coat or cloak

(Though not those conifers that confer needles, cones and so little else,

Evergreens I see less beauty in since what green comes never leaves),

I wander and wonder under rows, falling all over in love with cover of colors; 

Or just in lust with it, under those umbrageous umbrellas covertly coveting

Such rush of gold as makes dust of the other; and rust, blood, umber or fire,   

And branch and limb lit like torch or brand no flood can so soak as to drown,

Each leaf tipped or leaping with flame, made to flare like a lamp and to frame

All land in a lantern glare, setting ablaze the very shade- a grand conflagration;

All these trees will burn, at tip or to core, according to their differing degrees,

High and low, in red, yellow or orange, or ranged in colors stranger to see…

X

Lest we forget the first loss as we pass faster west on to the last, along all our paths

Memories like embers rise, as Space paces alongside Time, and fires are our guides,

Reminders binding us fast to past figures casting shadows even the blind can’t deny

(In me more ease is in dreamless sleep than any of those memories that unman me).

These fires consume but can also illumine Mind’s miles-deep mines, and mine I find  

Are all mineral-rich in a billion winding lines, brain-twined branches, veins like vines

(Twisted on occasion, in knots tied), not mere, meager wind-stripped sticks of winter:

The past I’ve gathered into stashes one match can kindle and ignite like a billion candles

(Every sun I’ve since measured by a Standard Candle I loved ‘to the stars and back again’).

XI

A child chilled within (a bitter wind’s bite making me wince), since sense with thought

Was tied in a Gordian- or, for once in my life, a Windsor knot- I only sensed I was caught  

In nets as intricate as any web or labyrinth of the dead; both in heart and head I was left,

I felt, to liken me to some tree in a field, more stump than trunk, by one stroke felled,

(Head or heart, unheard not unhurt, burst without a word by one of these three:

Blockage, hemorrhage or knot), a petered-out, stump-stunted, leaf-bereft tree.

Stunned, stunted, blunted, numbed, numberless finer-than-finger feelings

Went fleeing from me like ghosts from a house, the feeling of Life like birds or leaves

Flying from twigs (then for the first time in my life Life seemed fleeting),

And nothing I could think of, or felt free to believe, could attract them back.

What was bequeathed, in lieu of new leaves, was as glass, plastic, fabric or tinted-

Tinfoil-foliage made to pass as the actual; and I have to ask, what mask once it’s worn

For long enough without any varying, won’t seem the very skin one is born in? 

XI

Nature snatches the last as surely as the first, only it’s the early we preserve

More clearly for order is our recorder (and any worst or first fall we recall all the better)

And an abettor of our Memory; we remember as in reverse, for from the former

A latter takes form or course (of course), and by one too-deep dye my life was colored;

The child had no idea, but Life had no sadder ladder to climb, and found out how Death

Hacks and hews and acts as an axe all will fall to, and that it’s the living who gather after. 

XII

Memory’s no note or letter, no photo to deliver us up some moment 

(As losing a mom at ten) in immaculate rendering, nothing forgotten,

For ten-to-one torment and later thinking has altered our mental ink,

Tints and tinges pigments while pain erases, stains or paints us figments;

It’s a mistake we make, as lamentable as any of those oh-so-many,

To take these mental notes made of grey matter for tablets of stone

Truth is set on, as if moments are monuments as immutable as the Ten.

Recalled faces are comprised of and compromised by their many phases;

Age, pain and brain shall alter all shapes, re-membering them along the way;   

Too often turning over any thought smooths or strips down the original;

Each retrieving is a touching up, each glimpse just another little stitch

In the switching of a past pattern: at last patches of enchanted fabric-

Such magic stuff memory seems made of- are so mismatched that any memory

Is not the same it was; and how am I now the same as me, so to speak, if me

In evening is barely more than my every memory reborn from my morning?

Is a sun that sunk that one that comes? Is the mom I lost the same I summon?

Some men shun mentioning our more mournful dimensions of Life like Death;

Hard men will rid rather than remind hurt hearts of it, tongues tied and stung,

Utterly stunned under such suffering, uttering no more than some leaf or stone.

XIII

Leaves vastly past numbering I’ve discovered covering over the ground- around

A thousand trees encountered and counted countless mounds, the crowded together

Reds, browns, oranges or other colored, these shaped like hands, those as spades,  

Others as hearts or a child’s works of art; some among them are gathered  

And packed in sacks, the fallen hauled off every autumn, perhaps one last blast

Acting as an angel called down to cull and slay all of the stray and overstayed,

The ragged-and-tattered- some last master-scatterer sent to smite Time’s stragglers.

With twinges of pain (each ache akin to nothing with point or pin) I can recall many tints

And tinges of paint, every fiery fairy of the air, but fear to ask where Mind taints, or brain  

Strains like rays of bright light that drain the color away from some stain-glass saint.

XIV

The very loved are ever varied in the memory, and for all my recalling

I fear each feature is made fainter, that in the future I’ll rue that painter

Who altered all hues, reds to blues, for figure and figment will blur, merge

The oftener I remember- and faces may fade, soften, be lost among shades.

We map any actual maple, to take but one example, in one hemisphere,

Whereas all trees we gather in the other; I worry with my own mother  

It’s otherwise, that after much time Mind’s grafted, added true and false together,

And to get her as she was is not as easy as seeing one thing apart from two or three;

A tree may be missed for the rest of the forest, and a vision hid with many that seem  

Imprisoned where they’re amid neither the nether, nor the ether, nor now-and-here

(In sleep one, two or a few elude the mental sentries who bury that slew of things lewd,

Haunting and taboo; runes rise and run loose till we, opening our eyes, lose them anew,

Hunting then in the sun for them who only move under illumination of the moon).

XV

Psalm Ninety says a long life is eighty, and while it was far too weighty

A thing for me to think long on one passing at forty, I may be forgiven

For not ridding my spinning Mind, green in its grief, of pining, or of riddles

Too muddled to be very well meddled with, Mind having less vision of the finest

Divisions than the eye of faintest lines; one will see suns just set, or ones not yet

Over the horizon, or moons risen high at noon, as soon as he seizes on reasons

Equal to easing or soothing the suffering of his saddest season; still, I’ve had more

Than mere hints, glimpses or ordinary visions to lift me up, and if sorrows   

Today outweigh the joys I still believe I’ll live to view tomorrow’s glows,

Will know more highs than lows and more glorious haloes than dark holes,

Rainbow-robed skies with rays of hope, a reflowering of boughs long-blown

(Cold, dark blows the best litmus test as the deciduous in us gusts soon show),

Regrowth of all life, both high and low, and a reflowing of what’s slow or frozen.

XVI

Who rakes away the leaf-wrack Death wreaks? How do we reckon all the wreck?

Does loss on loss collect across Life until Death leaves us nothing left?

Will winter win and spring never again bring life to every twig, sprig and limb? 

Something like love tells me a seed sleeps in each leaf that falls; leads me

To believing each leaving bequeaths to me memories that will rise even as

Green leaves right before my eyes, with greetings sweet and serene scenes

Seen in my Mind; and I’ll find what I knew must leave me lives new within me.

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