Leaf Blowers

That autumn morning he awoke to the crying

of lost souls that quickly changed to the roar

of leaf blowers up and down the block. Still,

the lost souls hung on, although only as idea,

as if the day’s cloudy translucence had become

the gathered dead circling the earth. Nothing

he believed, of course, but the thought gave flesh

to the skeletal lack, who assumed their places

on imaginary chairs and couches: acquaintances,

old friends, relatives, as impatient as patients

in a doctor’s waiting room, an internist late

from a martini lunch.

Yet it was him, his attention

they seemed to crave. Did it matter they were false?

They were real as long as he imagined them.

And their seeming need for him, surely the opposite

was true, as if they formed the ropes and stakes

tying down the immense circus tent of his past,

till, as he aged, the world existed more as pretext

to bring to mind the ones who had disappeared.

This morning it was leaf blowers, in the afternoon

it might be something else, so as time went by

the palpability of what was not, came to outstrip

the formerly glittering quotidian, till all was seem,

seem, ensuring that his final departure would be

as slight as a skip or jump across a sidewalk’s crack,

perhaps on a fall morning with sunlight streaking

the maples’ fading abundance. Afternoon, evening,

even in the dead of night, waking to clutch his pillow

as he slipped across from one darkness to the next.