The poem never says what "we" are, but the title does. Once you read "Leaves on Grass," the line "digested light for a living" turns into a description of photosynthesis, and the speakers become leaves that spent their season facing the sun. The title may also nod to Whitman's *Leaves of Grass*. If so, swapping "of" for "on" shifts the image from pages bound in a book to leaves lying fallen. The central idea is simple and unsettling. A life given wholly to light leaves us strangers to our own darkness, and we only meet it when we are finished.
The construction mirrors that argument. There are six couplets in free verse, with no rhyme, no capital letters and no punctuation beyond apostrophes. The first three couplets are hypothetical ("we could've been… we could've been"), and the fourth turns on the word "instead," moving from imagined lives to the real one. The lines often run on past the couplet break, so the syntax feels like a thought unfolding. Then the poem stops short: "we meet our shadows / only at death." The line break leaves "only at death" standing by itself with a dull thud. The final couplet has no full stop, so the sentence trails off like something draining away.
The imagery of the "what might have been" lives is carefully chosen. Albatrosses "drifting on the wind for years" suggest endless open space. A bird skimming the sea would cast a shadow on the water, so being "able to dip into our shadows" is oddly literal as well as dreamlike, and the shadow "would've tasted like salt." Salt links the shadow to the sea, and perhaps to tears, so darkness becomes something you can taste, not something to fear. The second alternative comes down from the sky to a table: "playing cards / given darkness a respectable home." The tone turns wry. Darkness is domesticated, a lodger with good manners, and the alternative life is idle and shaded, a sort of comfortable intimacy with the unlit side of things. Whether the bird or the card-player, these lives share one thing, which is that they know their shadows.
The real life is described in plainer but stranger terms. "Having loved the sun" is unembarrassed, even tender. "Digested light for a living" is the poem's best phrase. "Digested" makes light into food, something taken in and processed, which is bodily and unglamorous. "For a living" works as both a job and being alive, so the pun says that this labor is life itself. The grammar here is also worth noticing. "Instead having loved the sun" hangs for several lines before the main verb arrives, so we wait through the long devotion to light just as the leaf does, until "we meet."
"Meet" is a good verb to choose. A shadow is not a stranger, since it has been cast all along, but the leaf has been turned away from it. Only the fall lets the leaf "lie atop them," a physical, almost intimate image. The closing words gather the poem's sound and meaning. "Lie" and "leaching" repeat the soft l of "light" and "living," as though the sun-loving vocabulary is being carried down into the ground. "Leaching" suggests a leaf rotting and releasing its substance into the earth. "Vital bitters" holds two meanings at once. "Vital" means essential and also belonging to life, while "bitters" suggests bitter tastes and bitter feelings. Our deepest essence may be what stays hidden until we die.
What makes the poem worth rereading is that it refuses to settle its mood. "Could've" sounds wistful, as if something was missed. Yet "loved" is not an apology, and calling the bitters "vital" suggests they are worth something. The poem never tells us whether the leaf should have lived otherwise. In twelve short lines it turns an ordinary autumn sight into a question about what we avoid by devoting ourselves to brightness, and it leaves that question open, as a leaf is left on the grass.