My friend Chris Schons asked me to post a poem I published in Minnesota Monthly back in the mid-nineties. It was kind of him to remember it, and I include it below.

Reading it again is bittersweet - sweet because I enjoyed reading it again, bitter because I have not been a good husband of the poetry muse. That is, I haven’t been writing poetry lately.

The poem is one of only a handful that I managed to publish. It was written when I was living on Grand Avenue in St. Paul and teaching as an adjunct in the English Department at the University of Minnesota. It wrote it after a frosty night caused a tree outside my apartment window to lose its leaves, which were still green, in a single day. The ground around the tree was littered with these strangely green leaves. I could not resist the image and its metaphors.

Green and Falling

Night’s frost sank deep into the tree,
Plunged headlong with the mercury.
In morning each leaf fell, spiraling
Down - one, two, four, one - raining
Down green on a black, cold ground.
By afternoon it was through. I found
The bare branches stark, surprising.
Strange to be still green and falling.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 8:57 am and is filed under Autobiography, Books/Literature.