The Sand Hill Review               http://www.sandhillreview.org 2008

The Last of the Elm Leaves

The discipline of that sound dry leaves make under foot

like ruined mercy, as if by sound alone it were settled,

what lives past its life replying to its life

neither hearing nor sensing, speaking as it breaks…

the exercise of this sound below the dying elms in August,

muffled in time by the rolling in of violent weather,

the great voice hidden in black air, the fissuring light and then

the avalanche of rain putting an end to the precise grammar…

so that now, deeper in, soaking begins the rotting,

the brittle flesh released into soft heat and silence,

slow, thick blackening on the trails, soon an acrid mash

sticking to the soles and underneath a warmth, then earth itself.

This humiliation, like the penetration

of grief, of voices lost: not one of us will not know it.

                                          *

So, into a season each comes, probably world-bewildered

from the first, or if not, by the time language has made its way

and self is conscious of the self, then death strikes

a new knowing, a grief so private the child can only speak in sobs.

How many infinities of terror must be wrestled to the ground

and tears sequestered in the earth, how many tellings of the primal stories

to keep death near yet move it far, while more and more it

persuades…the first old person, the stilled dog lying in the street?

I spent my childhood nights inventing the immortal

for myself. Some stories required the miracle of Lazarus

or Jesus encountered on the road, and some a twist

of Frankensteinian science, albeit always to the good.

Now I’m out of stories. A strong smell of leaf rot

confirms the closing in, all the going under.

J. David Cummings