Take a Leaf

For H. D. Thoreau

Take a leaf or a page,
as it emerges from a stem, a paragraph,
stretches out into arteries and sentences,
into a network of veins or words,
punctuation tracking down a sand bank,
down into the lap of a receptive reader,
where a gully divides into branches
because she tells her friend at coffee,
who becomes a gully, leading into a creek,
meandering into a brook, called Tweet,
flowing into a river, named mainstream,
stretching back into other brooks,
into the trench of a resourceful writer,
who ditched the branches of his organization,
for a filigree of roots and words, a web
of arteries and sentences, which move up
into a sapling, a paragraph, transformed
into leaves and pages, a different shade altogether.