Thoughts on Wind and Autumn Leaves
The wind blows from the wrong direction
for the piles we have raked to the curb
and for the trees that lean our way.
We were lucky last year and everything
scattered—driven by gales in the night
that rattled the eaves, bent the trunks away.
Houses groan, those as old as this one,
and when we woke, there was nothing—
like a shore at low tide or those gardens
like that garden we walked where
the woman combed the stones rhythmically.
It hasn’t settled yet, this wind. We go out
in the mornings in short-sleeved shirts
and try and make some sort of sense
of what we call our yard, all the little narrow
yellow leaves catching in our hair. We work
away and fret over the larger of the two trees
that isn’t ours. Just how much damage
will it do coming down? Eventually, we learn
that wind wearies us. So, too, worry.
We go inside to stand at the sink and drink
one glass of water after another. Piles rise,
spilling their contents into the streets.
There are days, now, when one has to wait
for the other to pass, the way made more narrow,
too narrow for two cars going their separate
ways. We wonder when we will be able to stop
worrying. Later, still, we find yet another leaf
in our hair, drying and turning brown.
Harvesting
We would scrape the snow away into
windrows, that word first recorded in the
1500s with no known origin— no country
called home where first uttered. Rows of
snow like those rows of hay or leaves formed
by machine or of seaweed or the fossil by
wind, by wave. We did this when the fields
lay bare. Our winter duty: harvesting the ice
for later warmer days. To chip into small
cubes or flakes for the cool drink or leave as
companion in a chunk for the slab of beef.
First strips and then blocks transported to
wagon, our feet always cold, our hands
frozen— the ends losing feeling. How
industrious and cheerful we appear, opening
the water back up to the sky, gathering what
formed for this or the skate’s blade or to
conceal what grew sluggish and burrowed
into the bottom, into the mud until spring.
Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, The Carolina Quarterly, The Pinch, and Salt Hill. She lives in the Upper Midwest. Find her here: https://www.krsamuels.com/
Photo by Tim Mossholder from Pexels