Leaves

Any day now, the next door widow will send her leaf piles skyward
In thick, stinking clouds above the neighborhood.
From the stoop I’ll watch
The cooling ashes shift and spread across the sky,
Without a way to say we burned as nothing I’ve known has ever burned.

I watch the spaces between a pair of sparrows looping the sky
Bloom and collapse with ease.
They are a couple of periods shaken loose
From an old letter, hidden my nightstand drawer.
I wait for them to settle.

The wind slips coolly through the empty fingers of the back yard maples
Without a whisper, pushing the porch swing
as if my memory had a gentle weight.
We used to sit for hours, our breath dancing on the winter air like ghosts.
I miss the skin behind your ears, soft like a peach.
And your cold fingers.
Most people don’t understand the brilliance of I love you.

I’ve thought of pulling a leaf from the gutter
And sending it to you to say: this is how it feels.
By the time it reached you,
It would be dust in the corner of an envelope.