A leaf that changes its mind halfway down was never a leaf, and Dave Bonta's "Leaving" builds its whole small drama on that fact. In twenty short lines, the oldest autumn image there is, a falling leaf, "reversed course / & flew." The rest of the poem counts what that costs the person watching.
The trick lies in the order of information. For the first nine lines we follow the object as if it were still a leaf. It "sailed up / over the trees," a verb that suits a boat or a kite better than foliage. Only at line thirteen, almost in passing, do we learn it was "the bird it was." The poem never announces the swap. It lets the word "bird" arrive late, so we have to reread the opening with new eyes, which repeats the speaker's own mistake. We are fooled along with the "you" of the poem.
The flight itself is one long sentence stretched over six lines: "It sailed up / over the trees / & didn't stop until / it reached a forest / inside a cloud / in Panama." There is no pause, so the sentence carries us from a nearby treetop to a dreamy, slightly impossible place, "a forest / inside a cloud." Then the last line gives a real country's name, and the vagueness snaps into precision. A cloud forest is also a real kind of habitat, so the image is fantastical and literal at once. Judging by that destination, we might guess the bird is heading south for the season, though the poem never says so. What matters is the distance. The bird has gone far beyond anything the watcher could follow.
Then comes the poem's driest and funniest moment: "You were left / with a double loss." The language of bookkeeping is a deadpan way to describe grief. The two losses are "of the leaf it wasn't / & of the bird it was," and the balanced negative and positive make the line feel like a riddle. The second loss is easy to understand, since a bird has been glimpsed and is gone. The first is stranger. You cannot lose a leaf that never existed, yet we do lose the ordinary ending we expected, the quiet settling on the ground. Mistaken seeing is a kind of possession, and having it taken away hurts a little.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and lines rarely longer than five words. The ampersands make it look quick and notebook-like, as if jotted down on the spot. The sound-play is subtle. "Leaf," "left" and the title word "Leaving" all share the same lips-and-teeth friction of *l* and *f* or *v*, so the vocabulary of departure grows out of the leaf itself. The title also works as a pun: what leaves the tree and what leaves the scene seem to be the same thing.
The final lines move to the ground "where the leaf / would've settled." The conditional "would've" marks the leaf's absence. In its place, "some rustling animal / vanishes / into a wrinkle / of wind." The casual, anonymous "some" suggests the speaker is barely looking. Rustling is also the sound a leaf would have made, so the animal briefly stands in for it before slipping away too. Notice the tense as well. Everything before is in the past (reversed, flew, sailed, were left), but "vanishes" is present. The leaving is still going on as we read. The "wrinkle of wind" turns air into cloth with a fold you could slip into, and ending on "wind," the invisible medium of every departure, leaves the poem open rather than closed.
The poem matters because it takes a tiny moment of misperception and finds something larger in it. It is funny without being flippant and sad without leaning on sentiment. It suggests that watching the natural world means being wrong, over and over, about what is in front of us, and that things are always already on their way out. In twenty lines, that is a lot of sky.