Leaves

by: e. hooper

There is a strangeness that comes from sitting and doing nothing.  A strangeness that arises in the brain.  A strangeness that brings forth either beauty or horror.  Or both.

It comes about on a late summer day.  Or an early winter morning.  Either bathed in light or hidden from it. 

It comes about in the wide open fields, tilting their heavy heads in an August wind or in the eddies of snow piled up behind the shed.

Warm light or cold.

Either/or.  Or both.

There is a strangeness that comes right now as I sit in the grey light of December and think for a bit about the possibilities just outside the window.  The grass is dead – has shriveled into dormancy.  The trees look like veins ripped from the raw wing of a bird – dark and limp.

And the strangeness piles up in my head.  I play with it as if it were papier-mache that has not quite dried yet; as if I could take the edges of it, pull it together into stiff peaks and run my fingers down into the valleys.  Peaks and valleys.  We can talk of the highs and the lows.  We can speak of the beauty and the darkness.  And, too, of the masticated pulp that runs through all of it.

And there you are: outside the window.  Outside, looking in.  Outside, leaning against the naked tree.  Naked body against a naked tree.  Eyes the color of the clotted sky.  Unblinking.  Not needing to blink, for your tears mingle with the mist and all is cold and wet.

I hear you now.

A plaintive moan.  But, no – that is just the wind howling against the hollows of this twisted old house.  Howling against the hollow of your mouth.

I turn my eyes from you.  You will not turn your eyes from me.  Summer has led to this winter.  And this winter will eventually melt back into another summer.  And here we will linger through it, our lives chewed and maligned by the passage of time.  Peaks and valleys.

Your body.

My words.

And so they stand and slump and are made for a return to the earth.