The Leaves

I can bless a death this human, this leaf

the size of my hand. From the life-line spreads

a sapped, distended jaundice

toward the edges, still green.

I've seen the sick starve out beyond

the grip of their disease.

They sleep for days, their stomachs gone,

the bones in their hands

seeming to rise to the hour

that will receive them.

Sometimes on their last evening, they sit up

and ask for food,

their faces bloodless, almost golden,

they inquire about the future.

                    *

One August I drove the back roads,

the dust wheeling behind me.

I wandered through the ruins of sharecrop farms

and saw the weeds in the sun frames

opening the floorboards.

Once behind what must have been an outhouse

the way wild yellow roses bunched and climbed

the sweaty walls, I found a pile of letters,

fire-scarred, urinous.

All afternoon the sun brought the field to me.

The insects hushed as I approached.

I read how the world had failed who ever lived behind

the page, behind the misquoted Bible verses,

that awkward backhand trying to explain deliverance.

                    *

The morning Keats left Guys Hospital's cadaver rooms

for the last time, he said he was afraid.

This was the future, this corning down a stairway

under the elms' summer green,

passing the barber shops along the avenue that still

performed the surgeries, still dumped

blood caught in sand from porcelain washtubs

into the road-side sewer. From those windows,

from a distance, he could have been anyone

taking in the trees, mistaking the muse for this new

warmth around his heart—the first symptom

of his illness—that so swelled the look of things,

it made leaves into poems, though he'd write later

he had not grieved, not loved enough to claim them.