The leaves are rattling down in the front entrance.

The wind’s picked them up and got them going around in circles,

the brown, the grey, the occasional crimson.

The neighbors have asked us to cut back the ivy

creeping over the meridian and clogging their gutters.

I think: I don’t have it in my heart,

but really, we just don’t have a ladder.

There are other people more prepared to do this,

who tend to life to make room for more.

But I come upon a season as if for the first time

and so my morning is given to these leaves,

gathering them in scattered piles

to tame the task before me.

Perhaps this is why I do not stand from my desk

and feel satisfied. Rummaging through old notebooks

is not the same as raking dead leaves on the ground.

The pages before me are unfinished,

while the leaves are lifted on a gust of wind,

taken from my hands and spiral

now brown now grey now red

and light the air on fire, if only for a moment,

before I shove them into the black garbage bag.

I look down again at the old manuscript found in a drawer

marked up in different colored ink—

take this out, add more, don’t philosophize—

and realize that I misread my note at the bottom of a page.

It does not say relieve, it says

We relive grief with every new grief.

Mackenzie Levitan has been living in Buenos Aires since 2013. She holds a Bachelor’s from Bard College and an MFA from la Universidad Tres de Febrero. She writes poetry and nonfiction in English and Spanish and has published in the magazine Aquilea. She is currently completing her first full-length collection of poetry in English.