Fallen Leaves — Jude Leger
Let us dispense with proper metaphor for a moment. We all
want to wander among overwrought repetitions
we all know: sunflowers, dragonflies,
everything mad with love.
You, rather, compared me to the autumnal variations that falter
into the gutter of this blanched whimper of a time,
where a child, trudging on the edges, might gather them together
and jump, and scatter, and destroy.
The fragments that drift down
through these windy and winded stone-gray streets,
blowing slowly, then suddenly, off the orchards and promenades,
that residue of fall:
fallen leaves.
Perhaps it would have been better
if the ecstasy of possibility
drifted away with the honking geese,
for we were only real below the seagulls
in the still, liminal summer.
My senses were graced with an acidity:
neon, sharp ozone, salt on the tongue.
You were monsoon in the heavy heat,
clarity in the sheets of rain that arrive
too suddenly and vanish.
But a miracle is delayed; and the rain
evaporates into iridescent puddles. And we
know that satisfaction,
the resolutive crunch of the fallen leaves.
The lampposts of San Giusto glistened
with the dampness of just-passed rain
and the sun poured down like honey
onto Oberdan. You, who always punctuated
your sentences with laughter, who pointed out
the silences, yet sat comfortably
with droplets drumming on granite,
and me, inhaling the petrichor of pursuit,
circling the ineffable question:
is it better to speak or die?
I, too often, look back. You, too, sought to
harmonize, softly collapse
in your perfume of ambiguity, create
beauty in the weight of things unsaid, while
the lightness of performing oneself fades away.
In your cool, quick fingers; in our interlocked shadows
I watched something sublime
let go.
The afterimage faded, and in autumn we returned
to our hectic parallels where your blue
appears eternally in my peripheral:
a blur almost reachable, pencil in the margins.
Then your final rain, clearing the last of the fallen leaves.
Tedium, expected disappointment carved into the bark,
and the trees are bare, the branches stark with pigeons.
What, then, remains? Photographs, poetry,
beautiful things; light–
reflected and refracted;
the flush of a tear-stained cheek;
and memories
crumpling
like letter-pressed roses in trembling hands.
Jude Leger is a writer currently based in Europe. When not writing poetry or essays, he drinks strong tea, listens to vinyl records, and reads just about everything. Young and inexperienced, he hopes to improve and publish his writing, create beauty, and survive his annoying sisters.