When Will the Leaves
- When Will the Leaves
become my tongues, or are they already the tongues of the dead?Which one is my wife's, hanging yellow
from her open mouth? Or is she now in the billionssinging to me through the leaves an octave beyond
the high C-note? No wonder blood spillsfrom my ears. No wonder notes float face down in it
like flies on the water. Fall, you are my mistress,but what of all these leaves falling from the mouths of the dead?
They sift down. I stab at the air to catch them.They cover the floor in me with wine and song.
I will dip my feather into their leaf blooduntil I catch enough to write their ghost names on the air.
Body of mine, go away now into the dust, into the stars.Hundreds of years from now, some boy with laughter [End Page 92]
frothing from his lips will lunge to catch my maple tonguewhen it is torn again from my open mouth. [End Page 93]
JOHN RYBICKI is the author of three poetry collections, When All the World Is Old from Lookout Books, We Bed Down into Water, and Traveling at High Speeds. His poems appear in Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Ecotone, and Bomb, among many others, and have been reprinted in Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize.
