by Leslie Leonard
Color spreads up the hillside in a deep, blushing rash,
the leaves around the thin evergreens
puffed out like the spores of a great orange mold.
The birches have flaked their skin, sudden and snake-like,
and now reach up
like bone-carved totems from the earth.
We use the nights to press our feet together, bare and numb,
or covered thinly in your running socks.
Inside, the water spreads
in Rorschach figures down the wall
from the hole you said you’d fix. Outside,
the trees are leaking down leaves like water droplets,
standing still and many-armed in their rough-skinned nakedness.
I must admit that I stand in the heat of the shower
and imagine sloughing myself clean
and anchoring myself with a solid, immovable tap root.
We may crunch the leaves beneath us, with our shoulders
bumping like old friends. But I am thinking
about the effortlessness of letting something die.
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