I can't sleep…
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
— Victoria Chang, “Passage” in The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022)
Notes:
How suddenly
the woods
have turned
again. I feel
like Daphne, standing
with my arms
outstretched
to the season,
overtaken by color,
crowned
with the hammered gold
of leaves.
— Linda Pastan, “The Months” in October 1999 Issue of Poetry Magazine
DK Photo from Cove Island Park, 6:55 a.m., October 25, 2024. More pictures of October in Connecticut here and here.
Every leaf that falls
never stops falling. I once
thought that leaves were leaves.
Now I think they are feeling,
in search of a place—
someone’s hair, a park bench, a
finger. Isn’t that
like us, going from place to
place, looking to be alive?
— Victoria Chang, “Passage” in The Trees Witness Everything by Victoria Chang, published by Copper Canyon Press, 2022. (via Read a Little Poetry)
Notes:
[She] says Remember, you’re writing these poems for god.
I’m about to ask her what type of poems god likes
when the wind picks up, sending a flood of small, round leaves down the street. Got it, I say.
— Chessy Normile, from “There Was a Forest of Pines I Loved for Years,” The American Poetry Review (vo. 49, no. 6, November/December 2020)
Notes: Poem Source – Memory’s Landscape. Photo: DK, Cove Island Park, Nov 12, 2020, 6:45 a.m.
Later I went inside, out of the nostalgic sad autumnal smell of leaf smoke, and talked a few minutes to the girl propped in bed with her hair in pigtails. Despite the nausea, her eyes were extraordinarily bright. I thought she looked at me with the soft intensity, the tenderness, that I had seen in the eyes of too many people dying of cancer-the look that says how lovely are the shapes and colors of life and how dear the faces of friends, how desirable it all is, how soon to be lost.
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things (Penguin Books, December 1, 1991, first published 1967)
Notes: