Loose Leaf from a Destroyed Journal
To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts.
                                                                —Ted Hughes

In my dream's dream
I rake the flood, toiling in molten gold streams
of leaves, leaves by the ream.

I can't keep up with fall.
Red words drop, I sweat, they drop fireballs
onto bonfires tall, as tall

as Babel. Inklings, they're kindling, they're towers
building hour by hour
as bleeding trees see fit. If lit, what powers

could smother them? They'd usher in a new Dark Age:
December, brown and sage.
Pages—rusted poems, scrawled, sprawled foliage

dumped a fathom
deep—they burn, they burn. Losing, I fought them
hard in the autumn

of my dream.
Now silvery, like the script of a frozen stream,
they whiten, love. They scream.

Copyright © 2005 Julie Sheehan All rights reserved
from The Kenyon Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission