“Inhale Fall” started out with another title. I wrote “Successions” in the early 1990s when I had just moved to Northern California from Texas. It was August; it felt like fall. In the Bay Area, August is sometimes known as “Fogust.” But the world is a bit upside down here, so September and October are often the warmest months of the year, and then we have rain, and then the trees begin to blossom in February.
This week I wanted a poem that situated itself in that liminal space between seasons, which other Substack Poets such as
have been exploring. But when I read the poem, it seemed like half of it was extraneous. Instead of just presenting you with a finished poem, I thought it would be fun to show you the original poem as it was published in Electica in July/August 2008 and then to show you the poem as I edited it in August 2024. It also plays on the idea of a series, which connects to the idea of “Successions,” the original title of the poem.Here is the original poem:
Successions
I inhale
fall in burnt leaves
I conceive fall
in the children upstairs
as they build an aquarium for
their snake Flash
Thomas holds up the net bag
against amber twilight—
a shade with an arrow-shaped head
darts toward me Students
sling their backpacks over
their shoulders At the store
mounds of apples—crunch—
bags of new potatoes
(The others aren’t?)
I want
to burrow into a hill of crimson leaves
I hunger
for pinto beans
the smell of barley As I dig
in my blue cardboard box of
wool sweaters, I drown
in the mothball smell
But I live in Oakland
It’s August
The fog will draw back
the sun reappear
In February the grass will be green
I moved here from Texas
I tunneled a hole through dirt
as a child digs for the other side
of the world in the sandbox As dirt
became sand, finely ground, then thickened to
dehydrated brown-black clods, I traced
an impression of my silhouette—
eyebrows groping toward
the flat nose From outside in
eucalyptus trees shed their bark
reveal an inner layer of skin
And this is the poem as I edited it. To me, the two kids seemed extraneous to the poem, as did their snake Flash. The title didn’t work for me. I actually don’t remember why I titled it “Successions.” To me, in 2024, the longing for fall stood out.
Inhale Fall
I want
to burrow into a hill
of crimson leaves
I hunger
for pinto beans
the smell of barley
As I dig in my blue
cardboard box of wool
sweaters, I drown
in the mothball smell
But I live in Oakland
It’s August
The fog will draw back
the sun reappear
In February the grass
will be green
I moved here from Texas
I tunneled a hole through dirt
as a child digs for the other side
of the world in the sandbox As dirt
became sand, finely ground,
then thickened to
dehydrated brown-black clods I
traced an impression
of my silhouette—
eyebrows groping toward
the flat nose
From outside in
eucalyptus trees shed their bark
Then I decided to play with the format of the poem itself and create a concrete poem. My first post on Substack included a poem shaped like a period. Then there was the semicolon poem and Punctuated, my chapbook of punctuation poems shaped like marks of punctuation. So I started playing around with the idea of fall leaves and decided to make “Inhale Fall” a concrete or shape poem.
Now you might have to stare at it as long as I did this week to see it as a fall leaf 🍁 — definitely not a maple or oak but perhaps a beech or ash leaf.
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Another Substack you might enjoy checking out is
by . Weston is not only a fine poet but also a discerning reader and a very kind soul.
I love seeing the editing process here. The seconds draws me in quicker and I love the ending. Your posts are always my alarm clock to go put Sunday dinner on (6pm here), which I'm off to do right now.
Love seeing the evolution of this poem LeeAnn, so good!