Leaves in a boot are a small, irritating, slightly ridiculous event, and Dave Bonta starts there: "fallen leaves / slip into my boots." There is no mournful autumn mood and no meditation on time. Instead, this domestic nuisance grows into a miniature comedy in which dying leaves become mischievous, almost diabolical characters, and their end becomes a party. The central idea is that decline can be flamboyant, that going out can be the best show of all. The same goes for language, which here is made of worn-out phrases that get one last glow.
The title gives the game away. "Decadence" suggests excess at the late stage of something, a luxurious rotting, while "postmodern" hints at a self-aware, borrowing, remixing attitude. The poem obliges with a patchwork of ready-made phrases: "off the handle," "agents provocateurs," "old scratch," "painting the town" red. The first clever move is a line break. "As if having invented flying / off the handle" first lets "flying" belong to the leaves, who swagger as though flight were their own idea. Then the idiom snaps shut on "off the handle," and the boast turns into a joke. The leaves have invented nothing, since they are only obeying gravity, and the "as if" catches the bluster of something that is really just falling.
The next image keeps the comedy going. An "agent provocateur" is an infiltrator who stirs up trouble from inside, and a leaf that has slipped into a boot is exactly that, a small intruder past the defences. The leaves are "eager to plunge still further," even though they have already fallen. Their descent into the dark of the boot is a kind of escalation, a falling within the fall.
Then the register shifts. "Going to and fro in the earth / and walking up and down in it" is lifted without quotation marks from the Book of Job, where Satan, asked where he has been, says he has been wandering the earth. Bonta lets the solemn cadence play for one couplet, then deflates it with "old scratch," a folksy nickname for the devil, and the blunt phrase "a job to do." The prince of darkness becomes a tradesman on shift. Coming straight after a Job allusion, "job" might also carry a faint pun, though that is an inference rather than something the poem insists on. Either way, the leaves are now both devils and workers, and autumn becomes a task being cheerfully carried out.
The turn comes with "but," and the tone moves from mock-suspicion to open admiration: "what bold and lurid / colors to go out in." "Lurid" suggests something garish, a little shocking, not quite respectable, and "go out in" is the poem's best double meaning. It can mean to leave a room, to die, or to go out on the town. The last couplet gathers these up. "Painting the town / a sunset red" revives the idiom for a riotous night out by making it literal, since autumn foliage really does paint a town red. "Sunset" brings in the other endings the poem has been circling, the end of the day and the end of the year. Death, here, wears its loudest outfit.
The form suits the joke. There are seven unrhymed couplets in free verse, with short, uneven lines and an easy, spoken rhythm. The couplets step down the page like leaves dropping, and the line breaks carry the punchlines. The poem is a single flowing sentence with no capitals and no full stop, so it feels like a thought passing through the speaker's head and it never closes. The sounds shift too. The opening is hushed and slippery ("fallen leaves / slip"), while later words like "provocateurs," "scratch" and "bold" are crisper, as the leaves grow bolder.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so little space. It shows that clichés are not necessarily dead, because set against a literal scene they come back to life. It also handles mortality without either sentimentality or solemnity. The speaker is half victim, with leaves in his boots, and half audience, admiring the performance. The poem's "decadence" is therefore cheerful. A season of endings is treated as a spectacle, and the poem's own recycled phrases enjoy it as well.