leaves

And as I sat there longer, the silence deepened, became thick with soft sounds. Every leaf, it seemed, spoke distinctly. I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes and in time my quick breath slowed. To the left, above my limp head, a small-leafed tree chattered gaily, while to the right giant tobacco-like leaves answered with their slow murmurs, their measured rustlings. New cadences joined every moment, until time itself was but a progression of these many measured leaf strokes.

I knew the wind caused the movements that made these sounds. I had no notions of self animated vegetables. But sentient vegetables, perhaps. It was possible that I had been looking at these leaves wrong my whole life – that, in fact, we held more in common than I had supposed. Many times my own mind was pregnant with thought, yet my lips were cold and still, or at most moist and trembling. My voice-giving breath was blocked, my gullet, my lungs, my stubborn sinew, my blood lack. A high pressure soul, bound by this mountainous, forceful world. And during these unwanted moments of still the world found me… cold. But the words would eventually come, the inner pressures finally shifting, hurling forth verbs, nouns, conjunctions, all acidified and spite-worn from their bilious cage. And who was to guess at the cause of this out-rush? It is reasonable, I'd think, to call it, too, the wind.

So the sun set, the air stilled, and the dangling leaves echoed my silence. Getting to my feet for the walk up the hill, I listened to the world acted upon. Under my greening toes slid the soft grass, the sensual sounds of its silky blades. Tilting my head, I heard the pavement's response to shoes of rubber and shoes of leather, I heard the asphalt tugging along at a bicycle wheel, I heard brakes moaning angrily at the cabdriver. And as the world voiced response to our yanking, our shoving, our blistering humanity, I grew increasingly melancholy, and my steps progressively slowed until I finally returned home, lovingly rested the door against the doorframe, and fell into a long, troubled sleep.