The Lingering Leaf

The oaks here whisper backward through the veil of ageless years,
Their knots are eyes that witnessed tears no human hand could dry.
This wood, a cabinet of ghosts where every root has ears,
Now cradles one more wanderer beneath its soulless sky.

Three decades past (or thirty blinks in death’s unblinking stare),
A child’s laugh had pierced this gloom like dandelion air.
Her name? The pines still hoard it in their resin-scented vault,
But autumn stole her footprints—left no map, no trail, no fault.

Tonight, the specter pauses where two brooding stones conspire,
Their edges softened by the moss, like letters drowned in fire.
Between them—something whiter than the owl’s accusing cry:
A envelope, unblemished, though the storms had claimed the sky.

No postmark scars its parchment, yet the seal’s a crimson wound,
A waxen rose, once molten, now in midnight’s chill entombed.
The specter’s hand (transparent as the memories it seeks)
Unfolds the page where ink still swims—a voice from childhood’s creek.

*”To you who tread the fern’s green script when I am but a sigh,
Who kneel where blackberries once bled their sweetness to your eye—
If found beneath the thunderbeech where we carved twin hearts entwined,
Know time has teeth, but love has roots no frost can leave behind.

You’ll scarcely mark the sapling now that wears our carved embrace,
Its bark has stretched the boyish vow to lines of weathered grace.
The crows I fed with crumbs and rhymes have great-great-grandsons here,
They’ll tilt their heads as you approach but never name my fear.

I watched the doctors whisper low—their words like falling moths—
While through my window, relentless, waved the wood’s accusing froth.
They said I’d see next springtime’s buds; they lied with gentle eyes.
The ivy knows—it writes my doom in cursive where it climbs.

So take this key of silver thread, of spider’s loom and dew,
To where the willows curtain off the glade I made for you.
Beneath the third lichen-crowned rock that guards our buried trove,
You’ll find the proof I loved you more than moon loves tides it drove.”*

The specter shudders—not with cold, but with the weight of dawns
Condensed to ash within this script. Through labyrinths of yawns,
It floats toward the willow’s weep, each leaf a jade requiem,
While nightingales stitch dirges from the silence following them.

The third stone parts its mossy lips; beneath—not gold, nor pearls—
But feathers from a kingfisher, a nest of plaited curls,
A soldier figurine (his paint dissolved by patient dirt),
And at the core, a miniature—two faces framed in myrtle.

The boy: all sunburned elbows, grin as wide as August’s reign.
The girl: a wisp of cornflower blue, her eyes twin skies of Maine.
Her hand grips his; his thumb obscures the date etched in the frame—
A June that melted decades past, yet here remains the same.

The specter clutches memory—a lightning strike of pain—
For in that face of laughing youth, it knows its own remains.
The boy who carved the thunderbeech, who swore through fevered breath,
To guard his friend’s secret glade beyond the brink of death.

But seasons, sly conspirators, had blurred her final trace.
He’d searched till maps disintegrated, left no sacred space.
Yet all along, beneath his feet (while cities drowned his name),
Her childhood pact lay waiting, stitched to earth’s enduring frame.

Now hollow as the birch’s trunk where owls hatch their brood,
He views the relics—each a thorn to prick eternity’s mood.
The nest she wove from meadow-sighs? A cradle for dead leaves.
The soldier? Rust has claimed his sword; the kingfisher’s wing grieves.

But lo—beneath the trove’s last layer, brittle as despair,
A second letter materializes through the spectral air.
This script, a palsied shadow of the first, yet burning clear:
*”Forgive the tears that smudge these lines—the end draws near, my dear.

I’ve asked the wind to carry news of where your footsteps stray,
But hurricanes are clumsy postmen; blizzards misconvey.
The ivy’s reached my window now—its fingers tap my pane.
I’ll send this with a sparrow’s help, though doubt clings like a stain.

When (if) you unearth memory’s vault, don’t mourn the girl I was.
Instead, take up this locket—let its chain be your cause—
Wear it through your wandering years; let tarnish dim its gleam.
My ghost will know its glint afar, though centuries intervene.

Now quick—the candle guttering here mirrors my weak grasp.
The willow’s verse must close. Our forest… keep it… clasp…”*
The signature dissolves—a watercolor left in rain,
While through the specter’s fingers slides a locket on a chain.

Cold silver parts the vaporous form where human warmth once dwelt.
It fastens round what can’t be neck, yet still the specter felt
The weight—an anchor dragging down through layers of regret,
To where the ocean of the damned cradles might-have-beens.

Dawn licks the treetops; shadows melt like wax effigies.
The specter fades, its outline frayed by sun’s uncaring kiss.
But as the first gold spear impales the glade’s protective gloom,
A flicker at the thunderbeech—two phantoms in its womb?

The girl in cornflower, hand in hand with mist that wears his face,
Their laughter spirals upward where no seasons dare give chase.
The locket catches sunlight—flash!—then dims to timeless rust.
The forest breathes. The stones resume their watch over the dust.