Falling Leaves

This is the season…

the one of falling leaves.



Of course, it takes a little wind 

to coax them down,

gently at first, 

wobbling to earth in crooked angles

like old people with yellow hair

parachuting 

from airplanes,

making a statement of the youth 

still left inside their dry husks.



When I stop on our trail through the forest

to watch these sudden surprises 

toppling 

down

from up there somewhere,

I think of you,

of our many walks in the woods across the years,

and the bittersweet love between us

now grown sweeter because we’re apart. 



What is it, 

the number of years    the days     minutes     seconds,

more than the leaves tumbling, I’m sure,

that we’ve been together?



Still watching the leaves fall,

I think of the fleeting essence of time,

how it has aged us, 

yet also moved us into realms of creation

we’ve never tried before,

knowing it won’t stop the pendulum

that begins now to wrinkle even our children’s cheeks,

but somehow, 

in the quilts you’ve sewn 

and the artifacts I’ve carved and built,

our passage through time has been made brighter, 

even justified,

to the world around us.



I close my eyes and listen to the leaves 

as they collide softly with others on the ground,

quiet as chickadees hiding in the trees at night,

picturing them in slow motion,  

bouncing a little when they touch the earth,

like bobbing boats on water,      

then settling silent on the yellow trail,

waiting for me to step on them

when I start my walk again,

whispering as I go at their myriad shapes and sizes 

and hues of green and orange and yellow and red,

like a second bloom, really,

more wondrous than the first one in Spring.



I think again of you, 

and us,

and I miss you. 





Poem by Frank Keim
Fairbanks, Alaska

September, 2015


Frank Keim is an educator, nature writer and environmental activist. He worked for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bolivia, an anthropologist in Ecuador for four years, and as a secondary school teacher of Yup’ik Eskimos in Alaska’s Lower Yukon Delta for 21 years. He has contributed chapters to the books Arctic Wings

and The Last Frontier, and published three poetry books, Voices on the Wind (2011), Today I Caught Your Spirit (2014), and Trails Taken…so many still to take… (2018). In 2012 he published White Water Blue, Paddling and Trekking Alaska’s Wild Rivers, and in 2020 he published Down Alaska’s Wild Rivers, Journals of an Alaskan Naturalist. He lives north of Fairbanks, Alaska.