Two years later. The maple tree outside the bedroom window has pushed out new limbs from the sites of the scars left by the snows the winter before last. You'd never guess it had lost half of itself.
It's January. The tree has already dropped its leaves. Through the interstices of bare branches I can see the first in the row of utility poles on the other side of the street, by all appearances identical to itself as it was twenty years ago.
In the breeze the maple's very last leaf performs a brittle shimmy on its petiole, waiting for a gust to lift it off to obscurity.
This will be the only record of this leaf, that there was on January 14, 2015 in a particular New Jersey suburb on a particular maple tree a particular maple leaf, senesced and shriveled and blanched by the sun, roused to a shuddering dance as it waits for
And there it goes. Exeunt leaf from history.
And the utility pole dreams cable TV and waits until its crows need a perch.
What are we waiting for?
every telephone pole will remember what it was, heaving out green branches to cast off the wires.
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