Going now

No violent wrenching or ripping away, no gradual agonized stretching before the snap, no whimpers, no groans or shrieks, no susurrations of sorrow, no noise in fact, no drama, simply a silent excision, a letting go, as the leaf, ready for days, takes its leave. A brief flutter as the few yards of vertical air are navigated, and it lays itself down on the innumerable other yellow scraps layering the lawn. A moment later, there's another, then another.

It's the oldest trope: falling leaves. Next come the reflections on mortality. Considering Veterans Day was this week, there might be references to soldiers, say in Flanders where just about this time a hundred years ago, furious armies threw themselves on the horizontal palings of machine gun fire and fell like mown grass.

I shall have to rake you today. You many leaves, now anonymous, each had an address--the twig to the right, on the third branch, on the south limb halfway up; and a history--this hole was gnawed in me by..., this tear from the great wind of..., this blotch was an infection; and a dignity of useful service, turning the ephemeral gold paint applied daily on it from above into an enduring phyllo of phloem and xylem.

Still, you'll all now be rudely assembled, heaped, stuffed into kraft paper bags, left curbside, taken, and along with brothers, cousins and ever more distant relatives of this year and previous ones, cooked down into compost.

There, another one falling, and another. No wind, for the morning is clear, cold and still, just a release: the unclasping of the abscission layer, and the dropping away. A flurry of them. A pause. Then more.

It would be trite to reflect, at this moment, on human mortality: 'Like the  generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men...' notes Homer. The cycles of botany and anthropology, and who knows, geology and cosmology. Like the generation of universes, the lives of...

Even when the buds already set on the twigs unfurl into next year's leaves, and what has color and softness now becomes stiff, brown and friable next spring, fit only to be turned into the soil, each of today's moments of spontaneous, no-looking-back departure will have been in its own way unique, as were each of the thousands who saw with alarm what one officer wrote about at the battle of Ypres: 'I told the men to keep under cover and detailed one man, Ginger Bain, as 'look out'. After what seemed ages, Ginger excitedly asked, 'How strong is the German army?' I replied, 'Seven million.'  'Well,' said Ginger, 'here is the whole bloody lot of them making for us.''At least, among us, the huge statistically significant numbers resolve themselves into units of significant perceptions and decisions.

You, leaves, so readily relinquishing your raison d'etre, going 'so gently into that good night,' are you regarded with the ardor of the gaze God-in-love directs toward us continually? If so, blessed are you.