I watch while the last of the summer leaves

the last of the summer leaves,

cornered by color, bullied by wind,

pushed from their tenuous

one-finger perches. Dangling

from hope, they yet cling to what was.

To what can never be again.

 

Buttressed now by stealth and stain,

the trees hold their breath and, in bloated hues,

leave behind what could never have been kept.

The molten days of August, now

Eastward creeping, cannot match

the closer dawn of winter’s darker agenda.

Change waits for no one.

 

Our frightened but fawning fraternity,

grips the once-dangling inside jokes. 

But our song-sick companionship, bends

to sight and chance and change.

Beyond the clutch and ken of

drowning dreams, old stories, made young

again in the telling, sleep in

the quiet choirs of shared experience.

 

Love, always trumpeting her own exploits,

is writ larger against the dim and shrinking page.

Huddling for warmth against the inevitability

of inevitability crouches the promise of the new,

ripped and wrapped in golden heaps of trust.

 

Grasp too tightly to the branch and nothing

comes to shape what shadow left behind.

Trading form for frame, green for gold,

gone for glow, tired specters of older

days return to their places to sleep,

and dream of dreams.

The pledge of change.

 

What is left after un-leaving

stays bleak but for a moment.

Soon, the barren skin of dawn

must shed to bear and bare what only

death could bring.

 

Everything.