Francis v. Old Woman

An old woman lectures me about leaves
littering the sidewalk this late in fall.
Leave me alone, I tell her.
I will collect them when time
is left over after the day’s creation
…or the week’s or month’s…
of what I’ve yet to know.
This chore is just too steep
for me today. And I just read
some article or another
that said leaving them is good
for the soil.
But not for the sidewalk,
back she yells.

I know this old woman.
My head is her shoe;
she has so many duties
she doesn’t know what to do:
the concrete exigencies of time
and obligation, washing the dishes,
doing taxes; they scrape against my mind
like rakes against walkways.

So I lace up that old woman tight in her shoe
and kick mine off, sit in a chair,
and my cat Francis, who knows the leaves
I’ve left too long; he watched each one fall
saying in his kitty brain, wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and wow,
I wonder if it will happen again
and it does, and did
becoming a great pile
of dead surprises.

He knows I’ve left the leaves too long
and just doesn’t care
as he explores paw by paw
the round perfection of my lap.

-Kitty Yanson