Thinking The Day - Ross Leckie

Dead Beat has moved into Ross Leckie country - D.B. thinks you would want to read this poem by the man himself - even if you have better things you think you should be doing - because you haven't.



THINKING THE DAY

Now is a time of thinness, the treetops
bare like the parts of speech diagrammed.

This the substratum of the way we speak
the keener edges of longer nights,

of livid greens blanched to paler
orange and yellows. The remnants

of a cow in a stockyard drained of blood,
maple leaves holding to the memory.

The way the day was fat with sunlight,
gone like a cloud of summer gnats.

A shriveled pear has leaked its juice
upon a paving stone and the buzz

of a late wasp is below the threshold
of hearing, the wings slower as if its

battery were wearing down. Autumn
rains have settled in to a smother of

low-lying thoughtfulness unmoving
in the sky, the street a matte of charcoal.

When the fire engine scuttled past,
it seemed it could not control the blaze,

the siren screamed of the urgent trees
bursting everywhere with saintliness.