MANDY MOE PWINT TU
Ginkgo
Fall stumbles onto the scene, soft & slow,
splattering crimson-yellow splotches on the trees.
Yesterday I watched the ginkgo leaves falling,
like golden rain spilled onto a yellow blanket.
I stepped on the fruit, downtrodden
by aimless feet. Disturbed the flies feeding
on the rounding carcasses, the rotting remnants
of a beautiful war. In the summer, the corpse flower
bloomed for the first time in eight years,
her fragrance of fish and decayed flesh calling
dissident insects to her. I watched her through
a glass screen; the greenhouse humming
with Venus flytraps and pitcher plants,
all of them outdone, outshone, by the giant,
the once-in-a-decade bloomer. She unfurled,
green to pink to purple in a span of days,
then crumpled like dyed paper back to slumber.
This last, lonely mercy, now: this standing underneath
the yellowing, this sighing of the lonely ginkgo tree.
If shedding means the rest will follow—
then, could I learn from the spectacle of this golden haze?
In the years following could I claim rest,
claim an ending? Hold that final, falling syllable
of this languid autumn tree, swept with the length
of lingering days,
& go.
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu is a writer and a poet from Yangon, Myanmar. Her work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Tint Journal, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of the South and is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is also a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. Find her on Twitter @mandrigall.