Your room is cluttered with leaves the way a yard
is cluttered with books. Some are raked into
precipitous piles in corners and under trees,
others have been scattered freely
by an early winter wind. Your body is soon
covered in a blanket of these books; with time
they take root, twining with your bones, and
your body becomes a gentle hill on top of which
stories grow as abundant and tall as great,
old trees, but also as silent as the trees,
except for when the wind grows mischievous
and scampers noisily through. And then the
leaves begin to fall again, softly, and I come
through and try to rake them into a kind of
order, stopping sometimes to read them
in the shade of the tall, old trees.
But I come less and less these days,
and your room has grown wild with books.