The World is Coming of Age (or:) Tarzan and Jane

I was young and we climbed trees,
pretending the blades of grass
were a rainforest. For a moment
she hung
in
the air,
almost gracefully fluttering
like another leaf spent of energy,
flung outward from the tree.

We did not have cherry blossoms
where I grew up:
only the dried up carcasses
of leaves, brownish and
miscolored, the rain
ironically mixing them into slush
like the burly forearms of
a butterchurning marm;
a sluice of greenless mud.

It was mid-autumn.

Her fall looked fatal to me,
a descension from near-infinite
height, until the childish pretension
faded: the fall would not kill
– only hurt.

Her chin kissed the top of
a protruding root (it was a French
kiss, the root plunging its
tongue with sensual desire
into the red-brown orifice
where chin-meat used to be),
and she was unmaidened,
perforated in that instant.

Our mothers’ wails outdrowned
her own as they escorted
her to: the restroom.

The last glimpse of her
I had was of a
leaf
, birthed out through the undercarriage
of her jaw, the brown
carcass of a stillborn
summer.