1.
\nKicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together
\nfrom the game, in Ann Arbor,
\non a day the color of soot, rain in the air;
\nI kick at the leaves of maples,
\nreds of seventy different shades, yellow
\nlike old paper; and poplar leaves, fragile and pale;
\nand elm leaves, flags of a doomed race.
\nI kick at the leaves, making a sound I remember
\nas the leaves swirl upward from my boot,
\nand flutter; and I remember
\nOctobers walking to school in Connecticut,
\nwearing corduroy knickers that swished
\nwith a sounds like leaves; and a Sunday buying
\na cup of cider at a roadside stand
\non a dirt road in New Hampshire; and kicking the leaves,
\nautumn 1955 in Massachusetts, knowing
\nmy father would die when the leaves were gone.<\/p>\n
2.
\nEach fall in New Hampshire, on the farm
\nwhere my mother grew up, a girl in the country,
\nmy grandfather and grandmother
\nfinished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables in
\nfrom the cold fields, canning, storing roots and apples
\nin the cellar under the kitchen. Then my grandfather
\nraked leaves against the house
\nas the final chore of autumn.
\nOne November I drove up from college to see them.
\nWe pulled big rakes, as we did when we hayed in summer,
\npulling the leaves against the granite foundations
\naround the house, on every side of the house,
\nand then, to keep them in place, we cut spruce boughs
\nand laid them across the leaves,
\ngreen on red, until the house
\nwas tucked up, ready for snow
\nthat would freeze the leaves in tight, like a stiff skirt.
\nThen we puffed through the shed door,
\ntaking off boots and overcoats, slapping our hands,
\nand sat in the kitchen, rocking, and drank
\nblack coffee my grandmother made,
\nthree of us sitting together, silent, in gray November.<\/p>\n
3.
\nOne Saturday when I was little, before the war,
\nmy father came home at noon from his half day at the office
\nand wore his Bates sweater, black on red,
\nwith the crossed hockey sticks on it, and raked beside me
\nin the back yard, and tumbled in the leaves with me,
\nlaughing, and carried me, laughing, my hair full of leaves,
\nto the kitchen window
\nwhere my mother could see us, and smile, and motion
\nto set me down, afraid I would fall and be hurt.<\/p>\n
4.
\nKicking the leaves today, as we walk home together
\nfrom the game, among crowds of people
\nwith the bright pennants, as many and bright as leaves,
\nmy daughter\u2019s hair is the red-yellow color
\nof birch leaves, and she is tall like a birch,
\ngrowing up, fifteen, growing older; and my son
\nflamboyant as maple, twenty,
\nvisits from college, and walks ahead of us, his step
\nspringing, impatient to travel
\nthe woods of the earth. Now I watch them
\nfrom a pile of leaves beside this clapboard house
\nin Ann Arbor, across from the school
\nwhere they learned to read,
\nas their shapes grow small with distance, waving,
\nand I know that I
\ndiminish, not them, as I go first
\ninto the leaves, taking
\nthe way they will follow, Octobers and years from now.<\/p>\n
5.
\nThis year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.
\nKicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,
\nremembering, and therefore looking ahead, and building
\nthe house of dying. I looked up into the maples
\nand found them, the vowels of bright desire.
\nI thought they had gone forever
\nwhile the bird sang I love you, I love you
\nand shook its black head
\nfrom side to side, and its red eye with no lid,
\nthrough years of winter, cold
\nas the taste of chickenwire, the music of cinder block.<\/p>\n
6.
\nKicking the leaves, I uncover the lids of graves
\nMy grandfather died at seventy-seven, in March
\nwhen the sap was running; and I remember my father
\ntwenty years ago,
\ncoughing himself to death at fifty-two in the house
\nin the suburbs. Oh how we flung
\nleaves in the air! How they tumbled and fluttered around us,
\nlike slowly cascading water, when we walked together
\nin Hamden, before the war, when Johnson\u2019s Pond
\nhad not surrendered to houses, the two of us
\nhand in hand, and in the wet air the smell of leaves
\nburning;
\nand in six years I will be fifty-two.<\/p>\n
7.
\nNow I fall, now I leap and fall
\nto feel the leaves crush under my body, to feel my body
\nbuoyant in the ocean of leaves, the night of them,
\nnight heaving with death and leaves, rocking like the ocean.
\nOh, this delicious falling into the arms of leaves,
\ninto the soft laps of leaves!
\nFace down, I swim into the leaves, feathery,
\nbreathing the acrid odor of maple, swooping
\nin long glides to the bottom of October\u2014
\nwhere the farm lies curled against winter, and soup steams
\nits breath of onion and carrot
\nonto damp curtains and windows; and past the windows
\nI see the tall bare maple trunks and branches, the oak
\nwith its few brown weather remnant leaves,
\nand the spruce trees, holding their green.
\nNow I leap and fall, exultant, recovering
\nfrom death, on account of death, in accord with the dead,
\nthe smell and taste of leaves again,
\nand the pleasure, the only long pleasure, of taking a place
\nin the story of leaves.<\/p>\n
-Donald Hall<\/em><\/p>\n\n 1. Kicking the leaves, October, as we walk home together from the game, in Ann Arbor, on a day the color of soot, rain in the air; I kick at the leaves of maples, reds of seventy different shades, yellow like old paper; and poplar leaves, fragile and pale; and elm leaves, flags of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2341,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2341"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4063,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3915\/revisions\/4063"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/csc-mcnair\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}