a leaf has come to the door
so bend the ear to whence we
reinvented ourselves through
curlicues of air,
lyrated phoneme,
drifting into the
venturesome moth’s
spell-drift-scintilla

to the banyan hump in the vale of reeds
hard by the velum’s body-store of silk
where the quill is deep-writ in the bark’s
tenuous amber, where the salt ache of
devious print, curatorial lore
carbon-calibrated parleys
have not glossed in our true worth
blown the dust-trail deep
past the paddy bowl

read the leaf coming in at the door
which has made this long and perilous passage
preserving within lessons of riptides
sojourns of persevering pain
so we may learn to go back
once in a while to where we were.
whence we came.