Dave Bonta's "Leaving" begins with a small, ordinary sight: a leaf drifting down from a tree. Then it changes its mind. The leaf turns into a bird, or reveals that it was one all along, and sails off over the treetops toward a cloud forest in Panama. The scene is playful and a little magical, but the poem's center is the phrase "double loss." The watcher loses the leaf that never landed, and also the bird, which has now gone too far away to follow.
The speaker's feeling is quiet wistfulness. Nothing dramatic happens, yet something slips away twice. The ending adds to this. Where the leaf should have come to rest, an animal rustles and vanishes "into a wrinkle of wind," as if the ground itself can't hold on to anything. The mood is light, dreamy and tender, with a faint ache underneath. The poem suggests that what we expect to see and what actually appears can both escape us.