Daniel Fitzpatrick
It is tempting, when an oak leaf
falls into your empty cup
as you walk to your minivan
at the end of another day’s teaching,
to consider everything that had to happen
for that to happen. I do not advise it.
You will have to begin with finishing
the bottle of whisky last night
and having to park in the far lot this morning.
Even before that, though, there’s the fact that
you left the other cup, the one you usually use,
in the van the day before yesterday. Of course,
you only started bringing that one because
the one in your hand today, the one with the leaf,
fell six weeks ago in the parking lot and cracked.
At any rate, you had the right cup and parked
in the right place and now at the end of the day you
decided to leave ten minutes early
because you were sitting in the dark in your classroom
trying to read a papal encyclical waiting for a call
from a mortgage company and you just couldn’t take
it anymore. You slowed down to tell two students
hello. Let that suffice, (it doesn’t, though, does it?)
for you, but what about this leaf, which fell
as your front foot hit the bridge over the little creek
that got just enough rain last week
to keep alive the ant that took a bite
from the leaf’s left side so that
it would spin neatly into your cup? What about that ant
and the other ant that chewed the stem a second
and the squirrel that slipped and kicked the stem
and the gust of wind that did not
(now we’re into the nots) blow because
an autocrat scratched his balls
and thought better of leveling Chicago?
You can go back to the night
your grandmother and grandfather went dancing
and came home and kept dancing
and couldn’t believe the sun was there
to wave their friends goodbye.
You can go back to the old fear you have of cats
which started when a strand of DNA
that would become you
in 25000 years was startled
by a saber tooth tiger.
You can, when you meet this leaf, try at last
to see whether you are the sort of person
who can buy a house in this economy
or whether you are, as you have always
known yourself to be, a failure,
laughing off a lifetime’s bad decisions
in verses dragged as badly to death
as that horse-haired fool below
the orphaned walls, in—it’s a boy,
for the 3479th time—
not counting the twenty years of words
and the six or seven thoughts
which could have been something
if for once you’d gotten off your ass.
You can do all that, certainly,
or you can go home in the sunshine
and walk below the palms
quivering with sunshine
and kiss your wife and kiss
your children and pour some whisky
into your cup, watching the oak leaf
swirl in the sweet amber like sunshine, and sip
and watch the sunshine shake on the palms
and on the lake where the ducks have come to sleep
and think damn if this isn’t delicious.
Daniel Fitzpatrick is the author of the collections, Yonder in the Sun and Quarter Blend Polly. He edits Joie de Vivre, a South Louisiana arts and culture mag. He lives in New Orleans.
X: @Fitzthewriter
