Withstanding

Contributor: Perry L. Powell

- -
Can I stand just on my rhetoric
or watch the pile of oak leaves turn
to brown mush like dead hands sinking
back into the stillness of autumn?
I am too old to climb the stairs now.
All the sweet skins I have known are gone.
My brain, like a ground squirrel, burrows
into its skull to wait for winter.

If this is a journey I must take,
no daylight can accompany me.
Like you, I will go to nowhere plain
and those who remember will remember
for just a while, for long enough that
the leaves will lose all their last shapes.


- - -
Perry L. Powell lives near Atlanta, and spends evenings wishing things had been different. Because they aren't, he writes various poems and prose, some of which have appeared in Aphelion, Atavic Poetry, Frogpond, Futures Trading, Mobius, and Modern Haiku.