The Leaves

The Leaves

The last time I saw you, you were so thin – so thin. 

I remember how it frightened me 

to feel your bones shift

beneath the pressure of my embrace,

as I leant down into the seat of the car to say goodbye

Imagined I could almost see, beneath the opalescent film of skin - your skeleton,

hollow like a bird’s.

For the eighteen months you had lived with us, as your health declined

but was going to stay, just for the weekend, at my uncle’s house –

your youngest son.

Two days later it was there that you died. 

We made the journey on that fine, bright morning

to see her, now ‘your body’

Laid out beneath the patterned quilt of the bed

you seemed

impossibly narrow, impossibly meagre.

A little residual warmth still in the clasp of your hands.

Your skin already becoming ashy, mottled.

Outside the window of your deathbed, the trees had turned to amber

and the leaves were beginning to fall.

And when we buried you, 

a fortnight later beneath the pale November sunshine,

I noticed the bodies of leaves trodden to black mulch at the edges of the churchyard

and the way that the trees seemed to be dismantling themselves - shredding and scattering

as though in sympathy.

I wondered, if it might be that I could re-attach the leaves to their branches -

to resurrect a time when you seemed better,

when together we watched the green bloom of summer emerge

from the window of our conservatory, where you liked to sit.

A summer whose passage I barely noticed,

Because such summers passed often and with little consequence,

and I had other more important things on my mind.

Now it is December.

Already the trees everywhere are being cloaked in fairy lights – a twinkling, ersatz revival. 

And all of this feels like a terrible desecration.

I look at the wrinkled skins of the fallen leaves, their fragile skeletons, and think

 of you in those final weeks – pellucid skin, the greyish veining of your hands.

I want to preserve these leaves.

I do not want them to decay; be swept into the gutter and replaced by the synthetic gaiety of the tinsel and lights.

Let the trees stand as they are – black and bare. Their mourning is a testament to mine.

I think of my you now buried deep in the ground.

And of how in time

The rotting mulch of the foliage will coalesce, return

 To compress around you in the cool black earth.

I do not want to leave this autumn.

Each passing day, each desiccated leaf, moves me a little further from your dying.