This Leaf

This leaf is an atlas of small worlds that travel silently.

This leaf is a tabula rasa, a scrim of thinning blankness waiting for change.

This leaf is the empty swimming pool after Labor Day, a shape turned deeper by emptiness.

This leaf is the tilt of the bird-feeder’s wooden roof clambered on by squirrels, spinning from a cord of fraying rope.

This leaf is a patchwork quilt, or the lining of one, found at a thrift store and waiting for its cotton body.

This leaf is an acoustic guitar secretly yearning for the buzz of electricity.

This leaf is the pond that is filling back up with water after months of crackling drought.

This leaf is a plastic tugboat the color of a jack o’lantern, waiting to be mysteriously sunken in a small moat.

This leaf is a cloud fallen to earth, limning what it touches with the disappearance of winter.

This leaf is a mirror, cupping the shifts of seasons above it and showing them off to the sky.

This leaf is a skillet, sizzling with flour and waiting for the little green dice of homegrown okra to give it purpose and flavors.

This leaf is the lens you lost from your glasses last year when you were climbing up a rocky bank to take a picture of a tree.

This leaf is a band-aid, the last one left in your upper left hand desk drawer, handed to a child whose elbow wants to wear the face of Batman.

This leaf is a sandalwood mala, sagging over the splinters of a wooden bench beside a pond you used to visit, its crimson tassel fading into rose in rain.

This leaf is the chamois shirt your old lover gave you, left beside the trail tree in the forest, its buttery warmth befriending other leaves now.

This leaf is the chalice that you found in the basement, one of a pair, tarnished but waiting to hold something wet.

This leaf is the puddle you stepped in in sockfeet, the touch of cold that woke you up.

This leaf is a shard of pottery tucked against the base of a big old oak tree in what used to be a garden.

This leaf is an anchor, but not one that works real well.

This leaf is the kayak you fell out of on the Coosawattee River near some rocks and roaring water.

This leaf is a crimson prayer flag ripped down by wind from the branch of a poplar in your yard.

This leaf is a page from a book in another language.

This leaf is the raft of logs and twine you dream of floating away on when you’re restless.

This leaf is a riverstone, cool to touch and carried in the pocket of your peacoat in December.

This leaf is a circle of abalone smoking with sage.

This leaf is a lost wooden chesspawn  lonesome for bishops and knights.

This leaf is the story of threshold you love like the poem you memorized in April, the one that sang like an angel might, the one you wrote down in four different places so you could read it whenever you wanted. It knows how to keep you up late at night and tell you things you need to hear.

This leaf is the note in the bottle, the koan you floated away on a rising Sapelo Island tide.

This leaf resists being part of constructed art and does not enjoy the way tape feels between it and thick journal paper.

This leaf is the magnifying glass you carry around to see even smaller.

This leaf is the top of a fencepost, once a circle but splayed into broadness by seasons.

This leaf is a crumbling cabin of tannin, its roofbeams collapsing in on the space inside it.

This leaf is the adventure of touch, the challenge of handclasp and holding.

This leaf is a page from the book I write every day, the one where every word carries more than most people would be able to see, the one with the color of slow smoke and pondwater at its heart, the one synonymous with the best prayer I’ve offered, the one that holds my fingers captive and shows them what to do when they don’t know. No one will ever read it, but its chapters love the world I give it relentlessly and without fear, certain of the rightness of moments and the syllables of speech, determined to keep on talking even when its writer’s voice is soft with another poem’s hidden longing.

©Laura Sorrells 2012

all rights reserved

the secret names of things

There are not names for many things, perhaps most. I make up names for how things look, when they change, how they fade, what their connections are to each other. The names just come to me, mostly, though sometimes I give them thought and planning. I sometimes consult books too, but mostly to find out what names have already been used. I have forgotten when I chose to name light that shines through spiderwebs at night “silklumen.” I think it was two summers ago, when a big garden spider who had made her web stretch across the eastern corner of my deck captured an errant flying cicada. I don’t know why the name wasn’t fiercer, more violent. The event was certainly intense, and the mostly artificial light I saw it under made it seem sharper and more calculated. Still, now when I see light through spiderwebs under any conditions the light carries that name for me.

I named the suspected but unconfirmed sound of tiny mousefeet in my kitchen on a winter night “skitterpaws.” I really did not want there to be mice in my kitchen. There were, though. I tried to make them leave without killing them. Eventually they did. In the meantime, this name did not make me less anxious about their presence. In retrospect, I wish I’d chosen something more abstract, less creaturely.

Last night I tried to name the recurrent experience of nearly crashing into a whitetail deer (sometimes a whole bunch of them, together) while I am out for a run. Nothing seemed to fit. This happens fairly often. I lose myself in my music or in the way the sky or trees look and suddenly this tawny flank and flashing banner of white haunch and tail blazes across Old Cove Road in front of me. No matter how frequently this occurs, the sight of the deer always makes my heart beat faster with exhilaration and joy. It always feels like a blessing, like a nod from the holy ancestral body of the forest. I know the deer population is out of control but I still feel called into conspiratorial beauty when I see them.

Mysterious ripples in ponds, probably caused by jumping frogs or fish, are called leapshadows.

The noisy, raucous phenomenon of a redtail hawk being harassed by crows (usually three, though not always) is called cawclobber. Really.

The area next to shore where cypress knees push out from under water into air is called the kneeshallows.

The phenomenon of dragonflies flying away when I first approach them but then coming closer and lighting either near me or actually on my body (usually my feet but once or twice my knee or ankle) is called snakedoctorsettle.

The mist rising off the headwaters of a busy mountain creek or river is called streamsoul.

I am still trying to decide what to name the way a bald eagle looks flying away from the side of the road as I drive past in my truck. I don’t think there are any words wild and strange enough for it in the language I know.

The mysterious grottoes in the forest below my house are called foxhollows. It sounds a bit too genteel, but I can’t seem to think of them as anything else. They are deep and green, and they sometimes have running water down in them, just past seeing. They seem bottomless and tricky. Really they are small caves, and they do open shyly into the body of the mountainous earth. Roots curl around and above them but they are not defined by trees. I have the feeling that if I look at them right they will show me something important, something mysterious and ineffable. That feeling comes other times too but not often. It has come when I’ve seen the eerie flicker of foxfire in a swamp and when black bear raises her snout and snuffs the air that we are both sharing and smelling. When coyote yips like a petulant child in the hills. It came one night at a place where two rivers flow together; I was awakened from sleep by the loud sharp slap of sound on water. Beavers, I was told the next day. The energy of it had a quality of singular deliberate familiarity. Palpable in the moonlight of three a.m. The feeling is one that really disavows language as we know it altogether. It stands aside from that and is more about the way things smell, the way they might taste if we could know them that way. The colors they are about to show us but fall just shy of letting us see.
©Laura Sorrells 2012
all rights reserved