Watching Blackbirds Turn to Ghosts

Tomoko and I talk a long time
about the gestures of a falling
leaf in autumn.

On the antenna outside
I watch a cloister of blackbirds
who are so still

they become the very shadows of blackbirds.

“The falling leaf is universal,” she says
at one point.

We keep the leaf and its archetype
suspended in the air a bit longer
by talking slowly, in wonder,

while admitting it’s consistently useless for us
to pretend to be clever in our poems.

I think of any leaf’s shadow

going calmly to the street, beyond
the street, beyond the syntax of rot.

The morning I’d seen a woman
twisted like paper
at the bottom of a long bridge.

“Everyone will always watch leaves
fall in fall. Everyone will know this ––
what it means –– the simplicity

of the fall . . .”



Reprinted with the permission of the author.