I saw the crisped, curled, and sere
beech leaf float from ninety feet above
on a serene long voyage across the air
and come to the fountain’s sheer
falling wall of water, touch, and be
violently thrust down, lost in an instant
in the sheen of the plunge to reappear
on the pool’s surface, shot back
toward the trunk it had hovered free of,
then slowing, in miniature narrows passing between
the ornamental rocks to sleep drifting
by a bee stubborn in a violet aster
and to swirl, copper, with many other leaves,
gold, red, and green, on a clear bed of water
an inch above perfectly fitting stones
laid long ago to be the basis
to my delight by someone I’ll never know.
This appeared in the March 2012 issue.
A. F. Moritz won the 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Sentinel. He has translated Chilean Canadian writer Ludwig Zeller’s The Rules of the Game into English.
