the world a letter

I’d forgotten what autumn is like around here. The leaves look so light. It looks like the only time trees are real. If being real is a balance between those forces which suggest transcendence (light, wind, ex.) and those forces which suggest sublimity (gravity, decay)—a balance between up and down—then this is that time of year. Spring, all looks ready to bloom to the sun and smother it. Summer, the greenness is full, but heavy & downward, the leaves are held up by their branches, in an external, not an internal, balance. Winter, well, expression of stripped by gravity, enough poems attest to that. But now, high fall, the leaves look like they are burning out of themselves yet stable—they occlude the trees behind them, almost make mention of them as a memory held but passing, speak of them as one would of a slight thing affectionately and barely held: When what is is what is to come. That is how it feels. It will pass, of course, and it is not true in the physical sense, of course, but like Proust’s staircase the impression told can be more true than what is, and that is how this balance is, today; having rained, and soon to rain, but not raining, between raindrops. The leaves suspend on themselves, relieved of the burden of chlorophyll, of the burden of growing—like the space between breathing in and breathing out—, and are.