The Leaf and the Nowhere Hole
Dan Johnson
© June, 2011
This poem was written while listening to a recording of Miles Davis play Flamenco Sketch.

Often during falls chill when things change; green goes to gray, the air is crisper, the rain, a precursor to the coming snow, life for a leaf soon hangs by a bare thread, unsure of how much time it has until it is snatched from its perch, made ready for a fall from grace. It happens one day when one season makes way for another; the right pressure, followed by the loneliest sound a leaf can hear…it is like a lover leaving with those forever and final steps that it happens. From the top of this mighty maple down its hardened outstretched arms to float with little lift from the fall air to a cold crisp bed of grass then whoosh a gust of wind lifts the leaf, elevating to new heights of hoping, praying, looking skyward with the dreams that it would somehow be reattached to the now barren limb…rain falls what can this little leaf do to survive…pushed up by the wind pressed down by the rain, soon, the rain wins this battle and the leaf is left to soak in cold heartless baths of …a drain…where it circles, wrinkles, circles, folds in unnatural shapes and circles until it is gone to a nowhere hole never more to be the greatest leaf of them all.