Leaves, and All

Looking out the kitchen window this morning,  I notice that the backyard is carpeted with leaves—carpet bombed, actually, leaf-assaulted, for it was clear the day before.  And I find myself feeling a pleasant anticipation.  I cannot wait to begin raking them up.

I’m not sure why, exactly. 

Sure, there’s the exercise of it, the simplicity of rake and arms, the technology of tool and muscle, briskly applied, haloed in the pale-gold light of an autumn afternoon.  And there is the sight of my shadow, now cast forward, now behind, always connected, and me wondering whimsically, who is the me.  And there is the coming, the unannounced, unaccountable coming, of thoughts, urged perhaps by the rhythm of repetitive motion, re-emerging from the deep recess into which they had silently slipped. And as much as I like watching the tumult of leaves falling, the abandon of it, the mad whirl and drift and tumble of it, the air-skidding intoxicated somersaultedness of it, I relish the neatening raking involves, the restoration, the feeling of satisfaction in looking back when done and seeing the visible change I have made.  But there’s more to it than that.

Each of those leaves is a tongue; my backyard speaks in tongues.  Each of those leaves is a calling card, a keyboard key, a communique of blades and petioles and veins and midribs and waxy cuticles and stipules.  Each of those leaves, scissoring itself at its axil, casting itself adrift, tells how long long enough is.  Each of those leaves is the tree’s self-wounding, an absence in the now making way for a presence to come, a leaving that makes way for an arrival.  Each of those leaves is a sign of transformation, the trees’ summery green chatter turned autumn’s red-yellow-bronze-brown solemn expression turned acrid-woody incense slipstreaming from the thurible of the fire pit.

But more than those things, even, is this: ceasing for a moment, standing still, I will imagine I can feel, slightly but perceptibly, the earth tilting away from the sun, and then I will resume, bending back into the work, lost in the sheer embodiment of it, the feltness of its physical motion, the being in the doing.

Raking the leaves.  It is, for reasons I can enumerate and rank but cannot definitively connect or comprehend, the very thing that, at this particular time, I find it necessary to do.  It is the customized piece for some jigsaw-puzzled need.  What that need is, I cannot with confidence say.  But, then, perhaps not to understand is to understand that which is necessary, that which is true.

 

The Wildflower

 

One morning it was just there.  It hadn’t been there the previous day, as far as I can recall.  But this morning, there it was, as if some nocturnal sorcerer had cast a spell.  A wildflower in my garden.  Bayoneted yellow petals, center-buttoned by a bronze, pixilated bud.   A Golden Ragwort, possibly, or a false sunflower; maybe a thin-leaved sunflower.  The name isn’t important.  Its presence is all that really mattered, the abrupt advent of this alien infiltrator within the landscape I had so mindfully, so vigilantly shaped and managed; this stranger in my familiar landscape; this rebellious bohemian scandalizing the well-mannered guests at my garden party;  this wild intruder, this invader and interloper, this trespasser and marauder, this uncultivated barbarian who breached the gate of my elaborately-planned, assiduously-tended garden. 

And I was perfectly OK with that.

I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shard of sun fixed on a spade-leafed stalk.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a doubloon of burnished gold strewn by some charitable hand.  I was OK with it because that wildflower was a shout of yellow in the green murmur of my late summer, soon-to-be autumn garden.  I was OK with it because that wildflower reminded me that though we are told a garden was the site of our fall, our loss of innocence, we gained an intellect, a knowledge of true things.  Lucifer fell from heaven.  Our fall was garden-level merely.

Were my garden a mind, that wildflower would be an edict recalling the imagination from parched exile.  Were my garden a heart, that wildflower would be an unsludging odd beat, an arrhymic swashbuckle to disrupt sclerotic drift.  Were my garden a soul, that wildflower would be a spindle entwined with golden yarn to darn its robes.  Were my garden a cathedral, that wildflower would be a steeple, a spired sign of human aspiring. Were my garden an alphabet, that wildflower would be the letter before “A” or after “Z;” were it a sentence, that wildflower would transform it from simple to unparsable compound-complex; were it a word, that wildflower would be an extra syllable, a prefix to undiscipline stale discourse.  But it is a garden after all, a hybrid place, a zone of indistinction, a fist bump between artifice and nature.   The wildflower stands resolutely on the side of nature, a warning of sorts against my becoming too big for my britches, lest in my frontal-cortexed pride I forget that I, too, am a biological being, a rooted creature.

I’d like to think that wildflower chose my garden, considered it a hospitable place, a sanctuary, maybe, to stop and stay a while.  But I know its arrival was purely random, a chance deposit blown by the wind.  Still, as with genetic mutations, randomness is sometimes a strategic procedure.  “There are some enterprises,” Ishmael tells us in Moby Dick, “in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.”   A wayward seed, invisibly riding an invisible current of air, made its arcane way to my garden and took on another form, became a visible presence, an enigma made material, provoking wonder, deepening my familiar garden, reminding me to pay attention to the cryptic beauties that appear all about us, who knows why or how.  That wildflower—an ambassador from the far-off and elsewhere, from the kingdom of mystery, toward which we should travel, must travel, even though it is a kingdom in which, finally, we cannot dwell.