Final Exam

Write an essay in which you show—WITHOUT TELLING—one deep, important lesson or change that has taken place in you anytime over the past three or four years.

Use NARRATIVE, IMAGERY, and METAPHOR. Quote at least two of the books you read for this class (so, ALLUSION as well!), integrating those quotations into the story you’re telling, and citing them gracefully.

Include a word-count: 1000-1500 words.

Here's are a few pieces for inspiration:

.Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life

When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you find a box canyon. You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.

The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will soon toss it all and not look back.

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the wall of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years’ attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls are bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck.

Courage utterly opposes the bold hope that this is such fine stuff the work needs it, or the world. Courage, exhausted, stands on bare reality; this writing weakens the work. You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)

The part you must jettison is not only the best-written part; it is also, oddly, that part which was to have been the very point. It is the original key passage, the passage on which the rest was to hang, and from which you yourself drew the courage to begin. Henry James knew it well, and said it best. In his preface to The Spoils of Poyton, he pities the writer, in a comical pair of sentences that rises to a howl: “Which is the work in which he hasn’t surrendered, under dire difficulty, the best thing he meant to have kept? In which indeed, before the dreadful done doesn’t he ask himself what has become of the thing all for the sweet sake of which it was to proceed to that extremity?”

So it is that a writer writes many books. In each book, he intended several urgent and vivid points, many of which he sacrificed as the book’s form hardened. “The youth gets together his material to build a bridge to the moon,” Thoreau noted mournfully, “or perchance a palace or a temple on earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them.” The writer returns to these materials, these passionate subjects, as to unfinished business, for they are his life’s work.

Word count: 590

Richard Wright, from Black Boy

That night in my rented room, while letting the hot water run over my can of pork and beans in the sink, I opened A Book of Prefaces [by H.L. Mencken] and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weakness of people, mocking God, authority. What was this? I stood up, trying to realize what reality lay begind the meaning of the words… Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were. Then, maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? No. It frightened me. I read on and what amazed me was not what he said, but how on earth anybody had the courage to say it.

I ran across many words whose meanings I did not know, and I either looked them up in a dictionary or, before I had a chance to do that, encountered the word in a context that made its meaning clear. But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

As dawn broke I ate my pork and beans, feeling dopey, sleepy. I went to work, but the mood of the book would not die; it lingered, coloring everything I saw, heard, did. I new felt that I knew what the white men were feeling. Merely because I had read a book that had spoken of how they lived and thought, I identified myself with that book. I felt vaguely guilty. Would I, filled with bookish notions, act in a manner that would make the whites dislike me?

I forged more notes and my tips to the library became frequent. Reading grew into a passion. My first serious novel was Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. It made me see my boss, Mr. Gerald, and identify him as an American type. I would smile when I saw him lugging his golf bags into the office. I had always felt a vast distance separating me from the boss, and now I felt closer to him, though still distant. I felt now that I knew him, that I could feel the very limits of his narrow life. And this had happened because I had read a novel about a mythical man called George F. Babbit.

Word count: 522

Mr. K. “A Night’s Sleep”

During the first ten months of my son Nate’s life, I got one night of sleep (Christmas Eve, the best gift I’ve ever received). Generally, Nate was up three or four times every night, usually for an hour at a time. Because of post-partum depression, my wife’s life literally depended upon her sleeping through, so nighttime was Daddy time. Groggy, occasionally abrasive, I would drag myself into school the next morning and pull myself bodily from the insomniac fog. Kate was emerging slowly from her own—depressive—fog; I felt the clarity, at home, that comes from crisis, from absolute need. Nate needed me, Kate needed me. But at school… what use was I? What exactly was I doing there?

One particular day in May, a class asked me that question: why do you teach? It was one of those days in AP senior English when half the class is gone for another subject’s mock, and the conversation had been ranging freely among us around the books we’re reading, the papers we’re writing, the themes and ideas we’re discussing, their relation to our lives. We were talking about happiness in Brave New World, and about work versus free time, joy versus pleasure… I told them the joy it is for me to witness them growing and changing. I told them about a student I had three years previously: she was part of an infamous 7th hour English I class, comprised of students with an astounding range of needs. I had several students in there who learned, I was aware, disconcertingly close to nothing between August and May. They helped to give me the sinking feeling each day that I was wasting absolutely everyone’s time.

One of the students who seemed to learn the very least over the year also evinced an unconditional hatred of me personally, treating me with daily contempt. Three years later, as she would enter her English class, next door to mine, she’d smile ear to ear, affectionately calling, “Hi Mr. Kissingford!” So when I see another student, a girl who hates me from last year, and she purposefully looks in the other direction, the anger still visible in every movement as she avoids me, I know not to take it personally. It’s not about me. The job truly isn’t about me.

And it’s not just that gift of a smile. Every day I facilitate the process of people reflecting on literature, putting their hearts into words, groping toward the expression of something like truth, discovering the incompleteness of any understanding, striving toward a deeper one. It’s a vulnerable, personal process, a singularly human one. It reminds me what’s important.

Meanwhile, at home, I’m watching Nate acquire language. He’s three and a half now, and can say anything he’s thinking, though with an hesitation, groping for the word. Takes after his dad in that. I remember only two years ago, one evening in the bath, he sat me down and explained to me what his day had been, with great seriousness and purpose. Every tenth or fifteenth word within the gibberish was English, and based on these clues I occasionally got his meaning. When I did respond with a comment or question that showed I’d understood him, he nodded, beamed, smiled, and exulted, “YES.” He’d got the whole purpose of language as representation of experience, he’d got the idea of sentences and paragraphs and response adding up to conversation… and since then he’s been working on sufficient vocabulary to plug into the grammatical structures that he clearly (somehow) had already internalized. It fills me with wonder. Earlier, when he began to generalize the word “cow” and its sound “moo” to apply to all of the wildly different representations of cows that we see in books and on posters… every step astounds me.

My students are just further along in the same process. And I too. I’m writing another show right now for No Holds Bard, this one about the supernatural in Shakespeare. I’ve been reading Hamlet and Macbeth for twenty-five years, and looking at the texts through this particular lens, the words are all new. We all just keep spiraling into deeper, fuller understanding.

In Brave New World, Mustapha Mond reflects on the danger it would be if people were to "lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge."

It doesn’t seem like that ought to be as radical an idea (especially in a school) as it is, but ask any kid, heck almost any American, what s/he’s living for, what his/her purpose is, and it will come down most likely to some variant of “the maintenance of well-being.” A good job, a nice house, enough money, a family… it’s the vision of Ivan Ilych: “On the whole his life ran its course as he believed it should do: easily, pleasantly, and decorously.” In his last moments, Ivan Ilych discovers what he has missed all these years, and, swept in that joyous flood of compassion, conquers death. Similarly, in Our Town, Emily realizes only after her own death the richness of life. “Do human beings ever realize life as they live it,” she asks the Stage Manager, “every, every moment?” “No,” he replies. “The saints and the poets, they do some.” I think of Siddhartha’s final, all-encompassing smile, and Jack’s eventual engagement in “the awful responsibility of time” at the end of All the King’s Men. “If a man knew how to live,” Jack muses, “he would never die.” I think of Yossarian’s joyous flight away from Nately’s whore in Catch-22, Oedipus’s sudden selfless empathy for his daughters, Biff’s hard-won self-knowledge at the end of Death of a Salesman, Hester’s choice to stay in the community, Job’s determination to confront his Maker face to face… I realize that I’ve been having this conversation all year with my students. Why live? What is in it, behind the experience of pleasant or unpleasant phenomena? How do we put words to it?

Perhaps it is the only conversation. It is certainly the one I need in my life, today, tomorrow, and on. And the communion with others who are engaged in this conversation, in the classroom, at the lunch table, in the department office, at home, among the actors and students and teachers and children and adults and striving, beautiful, vulnerable, growing, changing souls… What a blessing, every day, to be here together, learning how to live.

At the end of a day of this, of learning to name the unnamable, express the inexpressible, Nate comes home from pre-school and I from school, and he tells me all about it. We play “soccer ball,” maybe, have dinner, read some books, hang out as a family. Finally, we snuggle a little in the rocking chair, and I sing to him, then he puts his nose to mine, looks into my eyes and asks, “You going to rub my back?” “Yes,” I tell him, and set him on his bed. I rub his back, meditating for a few moments before leaving him to his dreams. “Good night Nate; I love you; sleep well,” I say, kissing his head. “I will sleep well,” he tells me. And we do.

Word Count: 1245

Lewis H. Lapham: On deadline

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;

Never to have drawn the breath of life,

Never to have looked into the eye of day;

The second best’s a gay good night and quickly turn away.

—W. B. Yeats

As a college student long ago in the 1950s I nurtured the thought of one day becoming a writer, and on the advice of an instructor in sophomore English Lit., I attempted to form the habit of keeping a journal. I didn’t know what it was that I hoped to write—poetry in imitation of Ezra Pound, novels along the lines of Balzac or F. Scott Fitzgerald, maybe stories like those of J. D. Salinger—and so I was glad to be told that it didn’t matter what went down on the page. Anything at all, the man said. Describe something you saw yesterday in the street, copy out five paragraphs by Jane Austen, reconstruct a conversation overheard in a men’s room or on a train, make a list of exotic birds, count the number of windows in Woolsey Hall, compose a letter to Rita Hayworth; learn to put one word after another, like your feet in your shoes, and maybe you’ll find out that you have something to say.

That the odds didn’t favor the speculation I could infer from the tone of the instructor’s voice, but off and on over the past fifty years I’ve kept up the practice of salvaging stray thoughts and random observations from the remains of a week or a day. Sometimes I’ve let three or four years lapse between entries; at other times, fortified by a surplus of dutiful resolve, I’ve made daily notations for periods as long as nine or twelve months. The focus has shifted with the books that I happen to be reading, with the trend of the headlines, and with the changes in venue accompanying the transfer from a single to a married state, but I notice that I retain an interest in the last words spoken by people bidding farewell to their lives and times from the height of a scaffold or the deck of a sinking ship, outward bound on the voyage to who knows where. The dying of the light was a topic to which I was introduced in grammar school by a Latin teacher fond of quoting Montaigne as well as Cicero and Sophocles, and somewhere in sight of an eighth-grade blackboard I was given to understand that to learn how to die was to unlearn how to be a slave, that no man was to be counted happy until he was dead. The words made a greater impression than probably was intended or expected because I was raised in a family unincorporated into the body of Christ, and at the age of thirteen, it never once having occurred to me to consider the prospect of an afterlife, I knew that I lacked the documents required to clear customs in Heaven. Eternal life might have been granted to the Christian martyrs delivered to the lions in the Roman Colosseum, presumably also to Sir Thomas More, saying to the man with the axe while mounting the stair to his execution, “See me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.” But without an insurance policy guaranteed by a church, how did one make a last stand worthy of Brian Donlevy confronted with thousands of Japs swarming ashore on Wake Island, or hit upon an exit line up to the standard of Oscar Wilde’s “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do”?

The question came up during the year in college when I contracted a rare and particularly virulent form of meningitis. The doctors in the emergency room rated my chance of survival at nil or next to none, one of them telephoning my father in New York to say that his son would be gone within the hour and he could save himself the trouble of trying to get to New Haven before morning. It was a teaching hospital, and to the surprise of all present I responded to the infusion of several new drugs never before tested in combination, and for two days, drifting in and out of consciousness in a ward reserved for patients without hope of recovery, I had ample chance to think a great thought or turn a noble phrase. Nothing came to mind; there were no windows to count, no exotic bird at the foot of the bed. Nor do I remember being horrified. Astonished, not horrified. Here was death making routine hospital rounds—the man in the next bed died in the first night, the woman to his left on the second—and it was as if I was in a foreign country waiting to be approached by the skeletal figure with the scythe whom I’d seen in the fourteenth-century woodcuts illustrating the lectures in the history of medieval art. Apparently an old story, but one that, before being admitted to the hospital as a corpse in all but name, I hadn’t guessed was also my own, my own and that of every other living thing on earth at that moment on the road to the same tourist destination—once-in-a-lifetime, not-to-be-missed—that didn’t sell postcards and from whose sidewalk cafés no traveler returned.

Three months later I left the hospital knowing that my reprieve was temporary, subject to cancellation on short notice, and in the years since, I’ve tried to live every day in the present tense, piecing together the consolations of philosophy from writers choosing to look death in the face and to draw from the encounter the breath of life. The reluctance to do so I take to be a root cause of most of our twenty-first-century American sorrows (socioeconomic and aesthetic as well as cultural and political), and as a remedy for our chronic states of fear and trembling I know of none better than Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers, published last February by Vintage. The global economy at the time was sliding into the wine-dark sea of unfathomable debt, and here was Critchley on the boat deck of the Titanic cheerfully reminding the top-hatted Wall Street gentlemen that Diderot had choked to death on an apricot, that Heraclitus had suffocated in cow dung, and that Montesquieu died in the arms of his lover, leaving unfinished an essay on taste. A professor of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, Critchley declares his purpose on the first page of the introduction. Absent a philosophical coming to terms with death, we are, he says,

Led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather old age) sophistries.

The observation speaks not only to the heavy cost of our health-care systems and our childish war on terror but also to the current losses in the credit markets and to the incessant hawking of fairy tales that is the bone and marrow of most of our prime-time news and entertainment. Had Critchley been of a mind to do so, I don’t doubt that he could have assembled a five-volume treatise on any and all of the unhappy consequences, complete with many pages of statistical proof backed up with oracular mutterings from authorities both secular and divine. He chooses to do something more lighthearted and therefore more useful—to take note of the deaths of “190 or so” philosophers with the thought that by attending to the manner of their shufflings off the mortal coil his reader might profit by their example. He borrows the device from Montaigne’s essay on the uses of philosophy: “If I were a maker of books, I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.”

The dramatis personae in Critchley’s register of last scenes, some of them described in two or three paragraphs, others at the length of two or three pages, rounds up the usual suspects, among them a few women (Hipparchia, Madame du Châtelet, Hannah Arendt), several Christian saints (St. Paul, St. Anthony, Boethius), and a small number of Arabs and Chinese (Avicenna, Averroës, Confucius, Lao Tzu), but largely the company of dead white males (ancient Greek and modern German) embodying the tradition of Western philosophy as it has come down to us over the past 2,500 years from Thales of Miletus to Derrida and Rawls.

Some of the anecdotes were familiar, noted in my own lists of final departures—Socrates at the conclusion of the trial that condemned him to death, saying to his judges, “Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God”; Seneca commanded by the Emperor Nero to commit suicide, engaging his friends in easy conversation while the blood drained from his wrists and arms; Voltaire, irritated by a parish priest asking him if he believed in the divinity of Christ, saying, “In the name of God, Monsieur, don’t speak to me any more of that man and let me die in peace.” Most of the stories were ones I hadn’t known—David Hume shortly before he died in 1776 graciously entertaining James Boswell’s assurance of a soon-to-be-revealed afterlife on the ground that “it was possible that a piece of coal on the fire would not burn”; Jean Baudrillard, writing his last book, Cool Memories V, after having been diagnosed with the cancer that killed him, “Death orders matters well, since the very fact of your absence makes the world distinctly less worthy of being lived in.”

For Critchley’s purpose it doesn’t matter whether the “190 or so deaths” have been recorded elsewhere or whether some of his sources are probably apocryphal or possibly misinformed. The sum is greater than the parts because the truth to be told, by Cicero baring his neck to Antony’s centurion on the road to Naples as by Heinrich Heine dying of syphilis in nineteenth-century Paris, can be verified at so many points on the map of time. Critchley leafs through the pages of his register and concludes, as did Montaigne, that the consolation of philosophy is “the stillness of the soul’s dialogue with itself. . . . It is the achievement of a calm that accompanies existing in the present without forethought or regret. I know of no other immortality.”

Neither do I. Which isn’t to say that I make myself an odds-on favorite to show even a semblance of the composure to which Critchley’s mortal philosophers bear immortal witness, or that having been granted a fifty-year extension on the deadline for a comfortable thought or a noteworthy phrase on my next consultation with the senior practitioner, an event now apt to take place sooner rather than later, I am anywhere within reach or in sight of the stillness of the soul conducive to poetry. But neither do I worry about missing the deadline. Certain only that the cause of my death is one that I can neither foresee nor forestall, I’m content to let the sleeping dog lie.

If the attitude is maybe nothing other than a new sophistry designed to excuse my refusal to quit smoking, one of Critchley’s proofs of the believing blindly in a magical form of salvation, it is also the refusal to inject myself with the fear of death that sells the financial, pharmaceutical, and political products guaranteed to restore the youthful bloom of immortality. I came of age during a decade when the answer to the question, “Why do I have to die?” was still being looked for in the laboratories of literature, the cutting-edge R&D to be found in the experiments conducted by Shakespeare, Dickens, Auden, and Yeats translating Sophocles. Over the course of the past fifty years the question has been referred to the cosmetic surgeons, the arms manufacturers, and the hedge-fund wizards, but I haven’t found my way to Jesus or lost the habit of reading the ancient writers unfamiliar with the modernized systems of risk-free metaphysics.

I know that dying is un-American, nowhere mentioned in our contractual agreement with providence, but to regard the mere fact of longevity as the supreme good—without asking why or to what end—strikes me as foolish, a misappropriation of time, thought, sentiment, electricity, and frequent-flier miles. Of the $2.4 trillion assigned last year to the care and feeding of our health-care apparatus, a substantial fraction paid the expenses of citizens in the last, often wretched, years of their lives. Who benefits from the inventory of suffering gathered in the Florida storage facilities? Seldom the corpses in waiting that serve as profit centers for the insurance companies; usually not the heirs of the estate placed as a burnt offering on the altar of Mammon in the temples of medical science.

Where then is the blessing to be found in the wish to live forever? Never before in the history of the world have so many people lived as long, as safely, or as freely as those of us now living in the United States. Never before in the history of the world have so many of those same people made themselves sick with the fears of an imaginary future. We magnify the threat in all the ills the flesh is heir to, surround ourselves with surveillance cameras, declare the war on terror against an unknown enemy and an abstract noun, buy from Bernie Madoff the elixirs of life everlasting. And what is it that we accomplish other than the destruction of our happiness as well as any hope of some sort of sustainable balancing of our account with nature, which, unlike the Obama Administration, isn’t in the business of arranging bailouts?

Absent a coming to terms with death, how do we address the questions of environmental degradation and social injustice certain to denominate the misfortunes of the twenty-first century? Our technologists provide us with new and improved weapons and information systems, our politicians with digitally enhanced sophistry and superstition, but it is from Critchley’s council of dead philosophers that we’re more likely to learn how not to murder ourselves with our fear of the dark.

Word count: 2447

Kicking the Leaves

by Donald Hall

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 doomed race.

I kick at the leaves, making a sound I remember

as the leaves swirl upward from my boot,

and flutter; and I remember

Octobers walking to school in Connecticut,

wearing corduroy knickers that swished

with a sound like leaves; and a Sunday buying

a cup of cider at a roadside stand

on a dirt road in New Hampshire; and kicking the leaves,

autumn 1955 in Massachusetts, knowing

my father would die when the leaves were gone.

2

Each fall in New Hampshire, on the farm

where my mother grew up, a girl in the country,

my grandfather and grandmother

finished the autumn work, taking the last vegetables in

from the fields, canning, storing roots and apples

in the cellar under the kitchen. Then my grandfather

raked leaves against the house

as the final chore of autumn.

One November I drove up from college to see them.

We pulled big rakes, as we did when we hayed in summer, pulling the leaves against the granite foundations

around the house, on every side of the house,

and then, to keep them in place, we cut spruce boughs

and laid them across the leaves,

green on red, until the house

was tucked up, ready for snow

that would freeze the leaves in tight, like a stiff skirt.

Then we puffed through the shed door,

taking off boots and overcoats, slapping our hands,

and sat in the kitchen, rocking, and drank

black coffee my grandmother made,

three of us sitting together, silent, in gray November.

3

One Saturday when I was little, before the war,

my father came home at noon from his half day at the office

and wore his Bates sweater, black on red,

with the crossed hockey sticks on it, and raked beside me

in the back yard, and tumbled in the leaves with me,

laughing , and carried me, laughing, my hair full of leaves,

to the kitchen window

where my mother could see us, and smile, and motion

to set me down, afraid I would fall and be hurt.

4

Kicking the leaves today, as we walk home together

from the game, among the crowds of people

with their bright pennants, as many and bright as leaves,

my daughter’s hair is the red-yellow color

of birch leaves, and she is tall like a birch,

growing up, fifteen, growing older; and my son

flamboyant as maple, twenty,

visits from college, and walks ahead of us, his step

springing, impatient to travel

the woods of the earth. Now I watch them

from a pile of leaves beside this clapboard house

in Ann Arbor, across from the school

where they learned to read,

as their shapes grow small with distance, waving,

and I know that I

diminish, not them, as I go first

into the leaves, taking

the way they will follow, Octobers and years from now.

5

This year the poems came back, when the leaves fell.

Kicking the leaves, I heard the leaves tell stories,

remembering and therefore looking ahead, and building

the house of dying. I looked up into the maples

and found them, the vowels of bright desire.

I thought they had gone forever

while the bird sang I love you, I love you

and shook its black head

from side to side, and its red eye with no lid,

through years of winter, cold

as the taste of chickenwire, the music of cinderblock.

6

Kicking the leaves, I uncover the lids of graves.

My grandfather died at seventy-seven, in March

when the sap was running, and I remember my father

twenty years ago,

coughing himself to death at fifty-two in the house

in the suburbs. Oh how we flung

leaves in the air! How they tumbled and fluttered around us,

like slowly cascading water, when we walked together

in Hamden, before the war, when Johnson’s Pond

had not surrendered to houses, the two of us

hand in hand, and in the wet air the smell of leaves

burning:

in six years I will be fifty-two.

7

Now I fall, I leap and fall

to feel the leaves crush under my body, to feel my body

buoyant in the ocean of leaves, the night of them,

night heaving with death and leaves, rocking like the ocean.

Oh this delicious falling into the arms of leaves,

into the soft laps of leaves!

Face down, I swim into the leaves, feathery,

breathing the acrid odor of maple, swooping

in long glides to the bottom of October —

where the farm lies curled against the winter, and soup steams

its breath of onion and carrot

onto damp curtains and windows; and past the windows

I see the tall bare maple trunks and branches, the oak

with its few brown weathery remnant leaves,

and the spruce trees, holding their green.

Now I leap and fall, exultant, recovering

from death, on account of death, in accord with the dead,

the smell and taste of leaves again,

and the pleasure, the only long pleasure, of taking a place

in the story of leaves.

Word count: 901