A moment with a leaf.

I saw a leaf fall
and, in trying
to describe it,
I tore it apart.

Through trying,
and wavering,
and quailing,
and not trying.

In that
green-gold cascade
I saw
a hidden heart,

but it was mine
to know,
mine to have grow;
the details
mine not to impart.

Autumn is gentle
as child's hair
and waves solemnly
at winter's despair;

her eyes are blue
and her skin is brown
and her teeth are white
and her hair is gold;

like a twilight diva
to behold,
whom in the throes
of career's wane
takes on a rich
and sensuous mane.

I saw a leaf fall
from a tree
without a will,
without a way,
and it descended and sank
eventually:
it had no name.

And, no, not melancholy
was its way:
in gentle expression of the day
and of reality
it lives inside the clay
or informality.

It is a lung
of a lung
and gives me lungs
to have come along
the words to say
not what the will wants the way,
but of a formless,
clear and flowing page
of the untapped mind's
undelay.