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/ Saw a Leaf
- Wesleyan University Press
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Now I Hear Now I hear two unsynchronized steel hammers pounding on steel, making contrapuntal sounds between them, as ifto teach me the first simple lesson about order, that there are many kinds, and that two could cause discordancybetween them as harsh as war; and now one hammer has stopped and it seems as if the other is pounding away even more rapidlyto gain on the other ifand when it starts again. I sit at my desk waiting for the answer, but now the silence is complete, the second hammer fallen silent, and I am left at my typewriter to make the necessary sounds that we associatewith life. / Saw a Leaf I saw a leaf flying in the direction opposite the ground, but there was no wind. Now how could that be, I wondered. It was a dead leaf, shriveled and brittle looking, one of the many hundreds that were dropping off the trees upon the ground beside my house. Puzzled for an explanation, thinking that perhaps an updraft had caught the leaf and sailed it into the sky. I watched it grow smaller and smaller to the eye, and soon I could not make it out at all. I shrugged and entered my house and closed the door behind me. I could imagine the house beginning to take off too, and I sat down as if to pin it to the ground, when as I seated myself, there was a tapping on the door. I was expecting company. I approached and opened the door. A single leaf lay on the doorstep at my feet. With Horace With Horace I take my stand beside the rocks and clear falls. I will not be confused by sound or the stone's hardness. Voices emerge from me and hardness takes from me its quality, for Horacelived upon a mountainside and made shapes that were not pliant. He dug for rock, as I am, of the born elements compressed. Did he crush his wine grapes 134 \ Poems of the 1980s ...