Leaves, Kafka and Frost

At 60

Green leaf falls onto

wet pavement, stirring in me,

what remains supple.

The Meaning of Life

Dow at twenty-

six. Unemploy

ment under four.

Still, I strug

gle to find me

aning in the numb

ers.

I started this poem stepping into the shoes of Frost's speaker -- a complainer who imagines first putting his neighbors out of their financial torment and then turns the fantasy on himself and the poem's auditor.

Kafka, I heard last night, once said, "The meaning of life is that it stops." Wikiquotes and GoodReads disagree about Kafka's authorship of the line. Still, it is an interesting line.

I don't see the stops -- the periods in my poem and in the stops fantasized by Frost's speaker -- to mean much.

I had a friend in college who spent a semester lamenting, "Life is so short." She is, of course, right, but in its shortness, who might we become?

I've forced my poem into a Tanka, because it too is short and suddenly stops.