Monday, March 31, 2008

Design for life

As though a leaf, falling from a great height, circled its own descent, fluttered bravely into the air till it remembered it was no wing, then sank, coming to rest at last on the lake's surface, landing so gently not a ripple stirred.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, dissertation sorrow, how lightly it falls, how lightly.

Me, of course, I'm playing "Nearer my God to Thee" on the deck.

n!

Cheshire Cat said...

I guess the solution to the riddle is that the lake's still frozen?

Falstaff said...

n!: Ya, ya, whatever. Now will you get off that deckchair so I can move it to its proper place?

cat: What do you mean still? If leaves are falling it must just have frozen, no? Unless you meant frozen still?

Cheshire Cat said...

My bad, thought it was a contemporary tale. Early spring leaf, Spring goes before a fall, and so on...

Anonymous said...

Falsie: You can have it. I'm just getting into the last, insufficient lifeboat the damn ship made.

n!

Anonymous said...

'till it remembered it was no wing'

i'm being facetious, but I totally pictured a Tom & Jerry moment here - one of them falls off a birdhouse, and thinks he can fly, and is going along quite nicely until he remembers he canNOT fly, and then falls straight down.

And cat, I didn't get it - why did it need to land gently to not stir ripples if the lake was all frozen over?

Cheshire Cat said...

Chevalier, well I guess i was just being pedantic and all - there'd be some kind of ripple if the lake weren't frozen over.

It wasn't funny to start with, and now it's travelled across the land of Non Sequitur and landed in "Huh?" territory.

Anonymous said...

we spring and then we fall.