Robert Frost once said "a poem is a performance in words," and Robert Duffy's poem emphasizes the performance side of that equation with its own self-energizing lines.   
 

UNLEAVING

 

It's still autumn by the calendar but winter by the air,
and only the oak remains beleaved; decrepit and dry
its leaves, like fire-darkened parchments, flutter there,
troubled by the wind and rub their backs against the sky
to soothe the itch of loosening they can't entirely deny
but will resist, for as long as aging can resist despair.
They'll struggle painfully to hold with fingertip or toe
and then, by twos and threes, nod downward and let go.

The sugar maples blushed and shed their garments weeks ago
and rattle disapproving twigs at such denial of the season;
and all the other forest, stripped bare and ready for the snow,
agree there's an unseemliness in delaying so beyond reason.
But the oak understands that these failing days, belabored
as they are by wind and cold, are all the more to be savored.

 

  aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa