Two Sides of a Leaf
“There is no escape from trees by means of trees”
– Francis Ponge
1.
It is a leaf, pointed, five-stars, a faded red on one side, a blighted newspaper yellow on the other. It fits well inside a palm, like a smaller hand with longer fingers that reach out towards yours as you hold it, though you do not hold it that way. You hold it by the stem, like a plucked tree.
The top of the leaf is smooth and densely textured, almost vellum-like, and filled with fractaling cracks and bumps that form an almost glossy continuity, curving concavely inward towards the central vein. Each blade is bowed, slightly, like an overturned boat, the mark of the moisture leaving, and already having left. It is brittle to the touch, and dry, and feels close to cracking. Soon to splinter rejoin the soil which once gave it life. But not now, not yet.
If you look closely, you can see it is, at heart, little more than a series of lines, starting at the stem, and splitting – branches branching off branches, one after the other, end on end, until the paths stop and, still proliferating, find themselves flung suddenly out into space. They grow until they grow no more, dividing like streamlets until they meet a dry bed, the pattern of the tree continuing onto the leaf, and then, having nothing left to give, letting it go.
This is when the leaf falls and how, later, when you are looking for it, even if without knowing you are doing so, you find it. It is hard to say why you pick it up, but somehow it reminds you of the something. Stevens writes that death is the mother of beauty, and it might also be fair to say that beauty is always at the tip of things, the things which are first to go.
2.
The first real memory I have of being a child is confused, as most early memories are. I am in the tree house my dad built for me in the backyard of our first house, now owned by someone else, though the tree house is still there. Square, about head height for an male adult (quite the castle, however, when you’re young) and covered with a dark-green tarp-like piece of fabric stretched over the top like a tent.
In the memory, I am kneeling in the tree house, looking down at the back patio through one of the slats between the wood when suddenly – and here is where it becomes confused – suddenly I am down there, lying face up on the patio. I am clutching my knee, my vision blurry with pain. One moment above, the next below.
I do not know what to make of this memory, or how to situate it. In fact, it seems probable that it is not even one memory, but two, at some point spliced together like two fragments of film. Still, something about it feels sacred, unretractable. Irreversibly true.
I do not know why this is, but I think it likely that its meaning comes not from what it was for me then, but became of it by accident over time. Like how patterns reinforce themselves, digging their grooves deeper and deeper until you cannot imagine that the ball could have ever rolled this way without first having come from there.