Ode to Ginkgo Leaves

Patterned, overlapping, flattened,
as if laminated on the concrete
sidewalk by the rain, a range of
beaten gold and calmer yellow,
paper doll-fans delicately fringed
now here now there with green:
teased and tinged with color as if

painted by a Japanese brush master:
touched now slower, faster, by new
glints of sun which wink with
quantum unpredictability through
quilted cloud: the wonder of
an ancient tree, the gingko,
which accommodates perversity

and brings the prehistoric to
the blatant now: New York’s emblem
of the why and what and how
not of its own ephemera but of
the Earth’s: obeisance to eons
of the never-known, gathering in
perseverance, strength the way

a soul must, silent and unseen –
exuberant -- prodding all that ever
grows, will grow, has grown.
Inspires trust, somehow, that life
will last: at least until another asteroid
comes blasting through the ozone
and creates another unrelenting past.


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