winter leaf in spring

In the street-lit early dawn, a mouse, crumpled and brown, scurries from the cold shadow of a small fur tree.  It rolls and jitters until it finds the wet street, moist from early spring snowfall.  The wind picks at it and it changes direction, running along the curb until it transforms into a leaf.

But the leaf looks like a frog now, jumping and hopping, rounded with strange contours, and suddenly still.  As a bird, it sits and totters in the breeze, picking at the sandy asphalt with its pointy beak.  The bird, a common sparrow, flitters high and twirls, dancing and flapping its wings.   It thrashes for the air current that will lift it away.

The bird falls as the breeze dies.  It falls as a leaf to sit in a muddy pothole, where it is motionless, neither sunk nor afloat.

I watch it from my window for a moment and longer.  I am distracted by early morning traffic that drones by, moving beyond and around the leaf in the puddle.  I can see how it twitters, the leaf does, as air cannot find solace, as the mouse-frog-bird-leaf trembles and deflects upon the surface of the quiet puddle.   Held in stasis, struggling to move, to wander, to discover, struggling against wind and gravity and surface tension, against simple time.

A delivery truck with salt smeared aluminum siding and a yellow decal turns down the lane.  I watch, for it is new, different.  The pothole with the leaf is too far to the side to be bothered; the front of the truck passes and I can see the brown leaf in its undisturbed echelon.  But the rear axel drops, eviscerating the pothole in a violent splash.

The truck with the unwashed aluminum sides and the yellow decal passes, leaving the pothole to refill, dragging in dirt and grime and mud and the same brown water.

The leaf is gone.  I look to where the truck has gone and there I see the leaf.  I cannot be sure it is the same mouse-frog-bird-leaf.  It is flat on the asphalt.  Can it again be those things it once was?  It is only a flat leaf now--good enough for display on a common wall.  Will the wind dry it? and then will it fold and wrinkle into interesting shapes that disguise it?  Or will it just be a wrinkled leaf?

No more can it run and hide on the wind; rather it shall return to the soil where it belongs.

for i am but a winter leaf in spring