leaves [letter to laura] (used)

To say that leaves aren't their true color until the tree cuts off their supply of chlorophyll and they then change to the crimson, mottled ochre sort of tourist attracting sort of colors that they do every year bothers me because its mechanistic. It's separating things into parts and investing them with symbolism that isn't true to the actual world the symbols are trying to extrapolate from. my whole objection, and what I can't understand, especially when you say: "Hypothesis: it is better to become one than remain I, and better still to become one, whole." is why you would ask the leaves and the tree to divorce, dare i say fall from grace into the mechanistic world of humanity, when they so obviously inhabit the grace-filled world of One.

to see leaves as falling for the tree is mechanistic. The leaves are the tree. the tree is the leaves. they are not separate from each other. If you are going to separate them you are isolating them from the poetry of process. Things do not exist in a vacuum of selfness. So far as i can tell, from my paltry observations, humans are the only things out their with a highly developed and overly acute sense of selfness--to which i attribute directly our unhappiness and isolation from the beauty that surrounds us. If we stop breaking things into pieces and creating a value system for them based solely on our own distortions of selfness we can see through the parts/whole dicotome, and into the interconnected ever-evolving beauty of process--poetry through motion, through seeing the through. In the case of leaves, the cutting off of chlorophyll (does that sound too anchored in the mechanistic language of science? forgive my childhood...better to say... when the iridescent beauty of summer begins to fade...) is only the the beginning for the leaves. The leaves do not die. That we think of brown leaves as dead is only our misconception of what life is. The brown leaf is still a part of a system- a verb in the poetry of motion. If we must insist upon our definitions of life and death then perhaps we should bear in mind the words of the new jersey poet "Everything that dies, some day comes back." The brown leaf is not dead though it is still a part of a larger cycle. lying there on the ground beginning to "decay"... too scientific... the warm fecund smell of the forest after a late summer thundershower when the steam rises off the leaves... that steam, that decay is actually a process of creation. the leaf begins to dissolve itself, breaking apart into, among other things, carbon dioxide, which through fairly complex chemical process (dare we use older terminology? alchemy?), which returns to the tree and begins the initiate the process of spring. those leaves buried under snow act as a partial trigger (along with the lengthening of days etc.), to inspire the tree to begin the process of budding and producing new leaves for a new year. Are the new leaves actually new? well if we take a mechanistic view sure they are new growth from the tree, but if we follow the whole process through we realize that the "new" leaves are created out the dissolved chemicals of the "old" leaves so in a sense the "dead brown leaves" are climbing back up the trunk of the tree and emerging out of it "green" again.

does the tree ever fall for the leaves? no. but the question is skewed toward a particular view of the world which supposes that the leaves and the tree are separate...that "one" could do anything "for" the "other" here we are wise to keep in mind the words of Irish poet: "...thought that we had the answers... it was the questions we had wrong"