travelling along the contours

THE SHAPES OF LEAVES

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak,
sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the ex- panse and contours of grief
along the edges of
a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at
the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching
gravel roads,

and felt a moment of
pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool,

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

Arthur Sze

From The Redshifting Web:
Poems 1970-1998,
published by Copper Canyon Press, 1998. Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze.


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