Leaves
I love the trees but hate the leaves.
Each fall the oaks bury us several times over.
You see that big pile surrounded
by mostly green grass?
In a week there will be no green grass;
in a day, perhaps, if there’s a wind,
there will be no green grass
and the process will begin again
of raking and piling and moving the piles
onto a tarp and moving the tarp full of leaves
again and again and again
into another pile until the pile must be moved
into a trailer or a truck bed for hauling
where it once more must be scooped away,
and the whole time we’re hoping against hope
that it won’t rain, sogging up the works,
adding still more weight to this burden.
A bumper crop, you might say, every year.
The leaves have never failed us, not once,
and “a crop is a crop,” says Robert Frost,
“and who’s to say where the harvest will stop?”
I don’t care how great a poet he was,
if he were alive and in my yard and saying these things
I would just want to kick him in the shins.
michael jarmer 