Ode To the Leaf That Fell On My Shoulder Outside Dooly Memorial Building Between Classes

I’ve been told to write about something joyful.

Like a hundred swans lining a riverbank,

slipping their necks into the water.

Like how no two trees hold the same shape.

Like a plastic chair adorned with spiderwebs

in the April light.

It’s been a year of longing, of long

slanted light through the window rearranging

shadows on my dresser.

It’s been a year of following mice

along the fences they run, following

sisters up mountain paths

to sit by the ocean eating fresh fruit,

cows roaming behind our backs.

It’s been a year of avoiding my room,

of weeping on the shower floor.

It’s been a year.

I once believed touch was a portal

to forgiveness.

Then I was stripped of understanding

by the touch of someone I loved.

I ran in the rain to feel the shape of my body

encompassed by the downpour.

I slipped out of the gates of myself.

I found touch again on the other side,

where I’m still looking for forgiveness.

I found definition in trees.

How the Palms grew long and thin

to avoid breaking.

How the Noni I used to hate

for the stench of vomit that filled my backyard

was chopped to pieces by the landlord

but still grew back next spring.

There’s little that cannot be undone

when given to light.

Every poem I write is an elegy for light

that will not die,

for the sun’s specific shading

that captures the outlines

of a stranger’s face

as they speak toward

what they love.

Like the mother at the Brooklyn bakery,

whose eyebrows searched for this last line

of a poem she translated from memory:

Don’t you know I, too, was once alive?

Like the boy outside the L.A. bar

with perfect blonde hair,

speaking about devotion and turning away from it

and turning back.

Like the coffee shop employee printing tie-dye shirts

out of his house, hawking them

to customers between shifts

and watching them leave through the tinted window

eyes gleaming at the sight

of them fitted in his design.

I am unconcerned with darkness.

I am unconcerned with toes tapping quietly,

the outlines of figures in the distance,

statues whose internal cracks never reveal themselves.

I move outward like smoke from a fire.

The thing burning is grief, is pain,

is a long car ride back from a house

I will never visit again.

The thing burning is a casket, is a shroud,

is a bulletin with a loved one’s face.

The thing burning is every word

that tried to undo me.

I move outward in joy

like smoke from the fire.

I am saying there are moments

more beautiful than life.

That some trees lose their leaves

even here in South Florida, even

without seasons

and within days, regenerate

the greenest plumage of the year.

Little leaf,

you carry with you from branch to shoulder

the history of gravity.

You touch me so quietly

I forget the pain of silence.