The Pilgrimage: Part 8 / Phillip Neal Tippin
The snail’s slime line
On guttered leaf, wood edge
A breath from stepfall
All the trees are off the leaves
Like theives, essentially naked
But with oil to stay the plague
And to burry their riches deep.
Palor rises when
The fight against cold
Feels lukewarm.
The man who lives by a creek
Has a wife, kids, and bridge to keep
And when the water and fish speak
They remind him of a brook washed
In the washing.
The winter light
Is trim, nimble
As fleeting.
Let me not soften the blow
Of language, seem
To compass, curtail what
Breaks upon and broke satisfies.
Too late, maybe,
But not too early.
I slept a thick sleep and dark,
Long and weighty with dreams.
So, refusing to retire their speech,
I was made to rest midst dread scenes.
darklybrightpress.com 
I’m not sure if this was meant to be written in this way:
“All the trees are off the leaves”
In any case, it works. It makes me imagine the falling of leaves from a different focus point. The tree isn’t the main object, but rather each individual leaf must shed itself of the tree in order to become part of the earth again. Maybe that is the point of all life. When are able, then we “leave” (sorry!) behind that which we no longer need to move on to our next destination.
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Thanks for the thoughtful remark, and, yes, it was correctly transcribed as “trees are off the leaves.”
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