Each leaf that falls is its own monument
for the life it had leaving a shadow’s shape,
each edge enterred in the depths of air
providing our summer with a season’s name
and my own body with a time inside the brain
defining those eternities a man would claim
with every sense of his being as always
or forever in the present tense,
like an elegant fence standing alone
surrouning a memorial’s weather-proof stone.

Kirby Congon