This poem is a reflection upon following poem.
I'm awfully sorry to have to get serious
but I think it's time I did.
This poem is about the necessity for discovering your condition
on earth called turnings.
And it's in short sections.
I am thinking my room is green, the sea green,
the grass outside my house, I may have caught a touch of it,
the grass and the sea renew themselves,
my room remains constant, I am changing in it.
The odor of an afternoon long ago comes back
in a fragrance of wet grass, I don't know what to do with it,
I can't remember when it happened,
I know it was intended as a happy afternoon, I let it pass.
When I ask who I am, I think of a river with its changing
clouds, I think of the clouds and sometimes
of a leaf upon the waves.
It was raining the day the world was born for me, as I
stood in a hallway out of the wet
and stared at the bubbles bursting upon pavement,
leaves gold, red, brown, black falling children
walking to school, their arms and bracing books.
I began as a tree and now feel the weight
and think height nothing compared to the burden of self.
I am a cover up for death, my veins, my credentials,
the figure is made.
In the morning, sun, the leaves fall yellow, pale green,
and wine.
The tree as mythical giants, tall as mythical giants,
silent and standing still.
Wind blow this leaf brown and skeletal,
leaf be lost in the woods turn to mold.
Leaf, is there a death?
Have I lived?
That door is closed, you turn around and walk straight
through the woods until you reach
a pond turning blue, gray, white, and sunset red,
the crickets.
You will want to sleep, calm as the black pond,
the stars will have spread a cover.
There was a vase that waited for water, there
was the film that formed upon the idle pond,
there was the vase drying in the sun.
It is a silent pond surrounded by silent woods
and shore, no animal or man in sight.
Here, as a child, I tossed my pebble
and now my stone and the ripples fade, my glance as vacant
as the smoothness of the pond.
In a clearing, you left behind a house itself.
You remember having closed it leaving
to visit another place and a further clearing only
to count the rooms and the minutes?
The door is closed.
You remember closing it and walking off
into the woods, your goods upon your back?
Does the leaf have courage?
Does the tree express a defiance each stage of its decay?
The door opens inward on silent forms,
the door swings outward on a trembling leaf, buildings rise
and light.
I was found leaning forward when I died, my body, like a wave,
above the shore.