Story of a Leaf
by Sarah Burgoyne
I leaf. I come to my means. I tip the branch—a final hymn note. I am the feast. The sun-spent afterthought, wasted west. A basement of light. The same letter of an alphabet. The foreign wind chant. The summer’s amnesia. The numb sum of it. The sieve of last light. The tree’s last count. The damned sweetener.
I am teething with beams. I am likening. I am kinding from the boughs. I am minding the stem. I am lisping yellow across a coast of green. I am keeping notes on the smallest animals. I am blessing the gnarled reaches. I am filling with sea dreams. I am dancing stomatas. I am nooning my election.
I fell. I tufted a clamorous spirit. I took care. I wrote my name in classical Japanese. I turned as I went. I turned as a boat on the waves. I harmed nothing. I bore my death’s descent. I jayed the light that sank in everywhere. I read no maps. I doused the air. I passed beyond meekness. I fainted in the liquor of autumn. So I went.
I was eye-longing. I was rendering seasons. I wasn’t stopping. I was billing winter. I was birding blindly. I was churning the memory of my flight. I was glooming the jump. I was housing summer months between me. I was self-imagining. I was furnishing grey. I was thinning bedless sleep. I was shallowing the heights. I was reciting the moss, the wintry pity.
I have come to my end. I have dressed in superb costumes. I have spent my last days without. I have prowled the reaches of sleep. I have scribbled your breath as thought. I have kept along. I have settled a home in the grass. I have wound the songs of light. I have connected parent and child. I have roosted among talons. I have appeared suddenly lost.
I have been kept along. I have been sober all my life. I have been a burning tongue in the fall. I have been winding up. I have been gunned gracefully by gusts. The moon has been moaning over me. I have been blazing into history. I have been unspeaking. I have been reading my life backwards. I have been indexing forgettable pages. I have been always coming to my end.
I had skulled the tip of summer. I had given the whole thing up. I had lined the tree’s madness. I had gnashed to the end. I had had degrees of first flight. I had awarded nothing to myself. I had limboed sullen selfhood and good order. I had waffled my brothers’ names. I had left the tomb of increase. I had aged unseen water. I had interpreted private wonder.
I had been glossing the skyline’s throng. I had been going unnoted. I had been acting the monstrous beard of the tree. I had been stringing the drenched map of fate. I had been digging down in my stem. I had been cluttering the last thousand years. I had been raging stupendous and impure. I had been preserving the tree’s rhymed hands. I had been flourishing among the great choiring bugs.
I will doze on the final touch. I will eye the face of the dog. I will be tranquil in Athenian dreams. I will move between countries of darkness. I will command inept attention. I will drown in the pressing wax of children. I will choose the canal of diffidence. I will stay. I will tally my life by mounting into dark.
What is the final touch going to do? What is the fabulous city going to be? Where am I going to find a milling neighbour? When is the full light going to be cut off? The vital bog sunk in restless memory? Who is going to eye the unborn birds? When is the world going to have turned enough? When is the abominable wind going to leave us to our hung sleep? When am I going to sink totally into the broken web of earth? Enter tranquil nighthood? The thought, merely lately.
I will be fully sinking. I will be praying to the narrowest tunnels. I will be spelling my name in blades of grass. I will be interrupting no one. I will be opting for foxes to further me on. I will be kneeling unseen. I will be peeking on my fall’s flight. I will not be calling to stop. I will be purely staying. I will be seeing my grave as blue. I will not be fearing. I will be running myself under. I will be one time seeming foamly. I will be travelling not. Done flight. Dumb flight.
I’ll have relaxed in defeat. I will have no wit to be afraid. I’ll have returned as a stray to the fold. I’ll have honeyed the season’s dusk. I’ll have applauded the theatre of air. I’ll have belled without voice. I’ll have stood still for many weeks. I’ll have strove not to desert nor be deserted. I’ll have been all-returned to soil. I’ll have snowed as colour. I’ll have strung my hopes limb-high in the iris of the sun, where the dead winter will have unconceded to remain near its beginning. In its numb foreign poetry, combly and frail, I will have left.
Sarah Burgoyne is a Montreal-based writer originally from Canada’s west coast. Her first collection Saint Twin is coming out with Mansfield Press in 2016. Her chapbook Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes was published with Baseline Press in 2014 and Happy Dog, Sad Dog with Proper Tales Press in 2013. You can find her work online and in various journals across Canada and the U.S.A.