Walking to School
Autumn, and I, not an especially
triumphant boy, descended in triumph
from Hillside down Evergreen where torches
of maple – yellows, oranges, fierce reds –
were lit for me. When the rains came, heavy
leaves fell, some gold like the cobblestones
of heaven, and I picked my way to school
from one to the next. Home owners who didn’t
quickly sweep, owned a sidewalk abstract etched
by leaf. Brown November. Homeward in
the early dark, breathing the acid smell
of burning leaves, wanting to grow up to be
one of the men who leaned on iron-tined
rakes to tend the smoking pyres.
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