Why Perfectly Green Leaves Change Color and Fall
Like women, so autumn
is God’s second thought.
Subtracting one rib to fill
a more perfect world,
she gambled on the absence
of green, a bare branch her proof
that empty is only one way of seeing.
This pain, she would say, is no more
than a path, the fallen leaves a language
for loss, your ache my promise
to give back green.
—Julie Damerell, Rochester NY
Julie Damerell teaches at a community college in Rochester, New York, and edits miller's pond. This is her second poem for Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf, and her java jacket and jawbreaker poems are her favorite publications. Last spring she wrote and delivered the inaugural poem for the new college president, and her parents drove an hour to see her minute and twenty seconds of fame. In the hall closet, somewhere among stacks of pictures of her two children and husband, she still has a few copies of her chapbook, Needing Blue (H&H Press, 2001).