Father,
in an instant
the odor of burning leaves
brings you back to me,

standing by the metal cans
where you stirred up smoke
from the cinder-hot
pecan-leaf inferno

singeing some back-hidden
pleasure center of our brains
by sending pungent arrows
of pulsing fire-clouds
up through breath

a cold winter day years ago,
when you were alive and
burning leaves out back
was legal.

Leo Luke Marcello
from his book Nothing Grows in One Place Forever: Poems of a Sicilian American
Time Being Books, 1998

used by permission of the poet’s estate