Leaves fall on the turds of modern sculptures.
Even the willow here loses what it
Never really had, the year’s well hidden
Appearance of something, so this nothing
Could commune with the nothing over there
And call that living, this thing – resisting –
That never lets us call it by that name.
Children pass like leaves – how crisp they fly by!
Red berry days display the happiness
So carefully not chosen on the way
Within the shelter of my freedom’s cage.
Leaf life floats down, unhurried to its end
Without a sound, except the mourning song
Of birds ever-joyful, ever-bending.
The hill that beckons me to climb—just like
The voice demanding suicide—does not
Allow the mind to ever understand –
The strict demands of contemplation make
The hiss of wind-filled leaves some mystery
That reaches to the center of my being
—That thing that never knows it is a thing.
Sun tears through the canopy as if it
Was a gift to me, the migraine light on
Leaves like grace—but what is can never seem
To be, life’s
miracle, mathematically
Reducible to the impossible,
Mere darkness owns these sparks that have no place,
That think that they exist until they don’t
And nothing evermore of what they were
Survives their moment – hope turned meaningless,
The light turned off forever for every
Thing that ever was, so that it never
Lived at all in records of eternity.
That’s what they want the falling leaf to say
– And who are we, so open to the myst-
Ery, to disagree – we've fallen here
Ourselves, so out of place, we make our peace
With nothingness so greedily, happy
To have shared our need instead of making
Meek apologies for how outsized is
Our feeling—and how we go beyond our
Selves as if it’s laws that we are breaking.
Soft the voice that tells us we are nothing,
How comforting to know we’re lost and cursed,
Bestowed the blessing of impermanence,
Annihilation’s grace, just to forget
We had some existence, we lived here once,
In a world too beautiful, its colors
Final, fearing we were responsible.
Oh horror as the leaf descends – that I,
Born so divine, could squander these precious
Moments of alignment, looking for the
Permanence of graves, the shelter of dead
Walls, the protection of the mind from the
Enormity of consciousness, from bird
Song ever beckoning to understand.
The long and wrenching cry “I am”
That we never can
Believe.
