Falling Leaves

Poplar and oak awake

all night. And through

all weathers of the days of the year.

There is a consciousness

undefined.

Yesterday's twighlight, August

almost over, lasted, slowly changing,

until daybreak. Human sounds

were shut behind curtains.

No human saw the night in this garden,

sliding blue into morning.

Only the sightless trees,

without braincells, lived it

and wholly knew it.

----Denise Levertov

The arc of stars above her head

Are a thousand years of life hushed.

Slender moonlight slips through her arms this night.

Her radiance grows with a strange and quiet light.

A gem is taking shape or a heart is breaking...

Memories fade and fall away to the ground,

for eternity there to lie.

Tonight and only tonight,

the tree knows what it is to die.

---b.

The leaves have gone through a myriad of transformations even as they lie there on the sodden earth: from tiger-striped leaves of the forest to the bright yellow stars of August; from the deep swirls of the brown, dry, crumpled and twisted around themselves like snails or shells, to the ones that are profoundly dark, as if they'd been burnt, blackened out..and the blazing red hearts that remember something of their former glory to the purple ones that write the world's prose on my doorsteps. Today, all I see are small child-like ones, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

~~~

Jigsaw puzzle:

The ability to match, to fit the pieces together. To intuit unity and hold that image in one's mind. But also to perceive what is unique, different from the rest and then to see that as something that belongs with something else, that makes sense against the background of another, larger picture. One doesn't match the pieces only on the basis of colour or content-but on shape and pattern...as if the style of a piece was as important as the fragment of the picture it carries with it. Once seen in the right light, the problem disappears.

~~~

The voice falters, and the hand hesitates. What is required is something beyond one's resources: a more sonorous voice and the blue incense of heart and word.

~~~

Silently the birds

Fly through us. O, I, who long to grow,

I look outside myself and the tree inside me grows.