misterchu:

I walk along the path by the old railroad tracks, toward the tiny station house where the monstrous black steam-whistling locomotive stopped. Both the track and station house are gone, but a bike path remains. 

I had come by here twice daily. One day I made the round trip twice. Papa had sold some wood from pine stumps he had dug out of the ground, and I had been given the cash and told to stop and buy bread at the village bakery on my way back from school. But I came back empty-handed.

Forgetting was no excuse. I had to turn around and go back again, in order to learn that if you don’t have it in your head, then you must have it in your legs - a good theory, but more running never helped me get less spacey. Just possibly it made me a better runner.

-Bernd Heinrich

[Who is a very good runner indeed - MC] 

 

Pale leaves cling to thin branches 

wilted yet dainty

they fell in love with autumn sunlight

With each passing day

the sun shows up 

less

and 

less.

the leaves do not falter

do not falter

to question their impermanence

they do not know they are composed of sunlight

they do not know. 

Every once in awhile we stumble upon a new word 

A word we lived without

A word that made the world beautiful

without our thoughts

It was on a tiny black plaque

nailed to a small American Beech

“The American Beech can be identified by marcescence

the tendency for stems to cling on to their dead, wilted leaves”.

Pale, slightly transparent peach 

slips of crinkled parchment paper

the leaves hung right above the plaque

                                                                    as if they knew.

An evolutionary mishap 

I wished to break the leaf from stem

write a poem on its burnt sienna midrip

the word

Marcescent