Vol. 1 # 1
The Falling Leaf Review
Ring around the Rosy; or Reading between the Lines
I still press flowers between the pages of books. I used to do this more often when I was younger than I am now, no longer doing now, petals pressed between the pages of one book of poetry or another. I remember that I used to find them years later when I returned to the books again after an interim of years, sometimes only months, yet, once in a while decades, but more frequently, a matter of weeks. Now things I recollect are getting to be decades old. I can’t determine if what I remember is something that happened or something I dreamed or something I imagined. A faded crumbling daffodil between the pages of Yeats, “When You Are Old.” Childhood comes flooding back like the blood in my eye the day I hit myself in my right eye with my laptop bag caught on the chair it was hanging off of during a meeting at work, coming free of its hitch just as I was lowering my head to see if I could see better, ironies never end. But the rhythm of remembering, the punctuation of sound and pause, silences keeping time what I think I recall, recollection yet another thing. Ring around the rosy . . . all about understanding alliteration and consonance and assonance, keys to poetry in English. A pocket full of posies. I say again, no gain,
August 19, 2016
something noticed for a long time now; this rhyme when I was a boy, I used to sing, now decades ago, other children’s rhymes as well, welling, I used to imagine what the song was about, my father had told me when I was still a boy, single digits. Ring around the rosy, a pocketful of posies, ashes, ashes, all fall . . . to fall in French is tomber, the origin of our word ‘tomb.’ The tomb is everyone’s final fall. Everything seems to be falling, falling down. I prefer the fall, the season, I was born in October. A pocketful of posies . . . posies, flowers, the petals of the flowers in the pockets of my ancestors . . . the plague would eventually ravish almost a third of Europe. London Bridge’s falling down too . . . The Twin Tower’s falling down, falling down, falling down . . . How many children's rhymes do I recollect? One-third of Europe died from the Black Death in the 14th century. I can recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” yes, with fleece as white as . . . I can recite “Hey Diddlediddle,” yes, the cat and the fiddle and all about how the cow jumped over the moon . . . cows could jump over the moon when I was a boy, and dog’s, well there was the dog that laughed to see such sport, yes, dog’s laughing at the sport of a cow jumping over the moon and a cat playing a fiddle, and then how all came together in the manner of a dish that could . . . yes, the dish ran away with the spoon, dishes could run as could spoons, the dish ran away with 15