Gathering Leaves in Grade School

They were smooth ovals, and some the shade of potatoes— some had been moth-eaten or spotted, the maples were starched, and crackled like campfire. We put them under tracing paper and rubbed our crayons over them, X-raying the spread of their bones and black, veined catacombs. We colored them green and brown and orange, and cut them out along the edges, labeling them deciduous or evergreen. All day, in the stuffy air of the classroom, with its cockeyed globe, and nautical maps of ocean floors, I watched those leaves lost in their own worlds flap on the pins of the bulletin boards: without branches or roots, or even a sky to hold on to.