Change one letter in a famous title and you get a joke, a sneeze of a joke, but also a thesis. «Leaves of gas» sounds like a nudge at Whitman's *Leaves of Grass*, and the poem itself says "grass" only once, in its middle stanza, as if the word had been blown into the title and left a gap behind. Gas is the thing grass becomes in a grazing animal, and it is also the old slang for idle talk. Either way it is lighter and ruder than the book it echoes, and the poem seems happy to be so.
On the surface, six short lines sketch a scene. It is "bull weather," a phrase that is not standard English and so has to be felt rather than looked up. It suggests heat, heaviness, or the season of animals, a day when the air itself has horns. In it, "we are mistaken for horses." The poem never says who is mistaking us, and the vagueness helps. The speakers have become part of the landscape, so blurred into the field that an onlooker can no longer tell people from livestock. Then comes the second stanza's comparison: "deep as drunken scholars / in the grass." The speakers lie, or sink, in the grass as deeply as scholars sink into drink. Scholars are usually sunk in books, so the simile quietly swaps one kind of absorption for another.
That swap is the poem's central idea, as I read it. Learning is moved out of the library and into the meadow, and it is made tipsy, bodily, and a little ridiculous. The final stanza turns this into a kind of generosity: "enough for all / the conversation that lives." The grass is enough, and so is the space, the gas, the talk. The line has no punctuation and no object, and it is open to two readings. There may be enough for all the conversation that lives, meaning all of it, every voice. Or there may be enough for all, the conversation that lives, with "the conversation that lives" naming what the scholars have found. The second reading sets living talk against the dead talk of the lecture hall. The poem doesn't choose, and the open ending feels like a trailing-off in a field.
The construction supports this looseness. There are three two-line stanzas, no capitals, no end punctuation and no rhyme. The lines are short and carry little metrical machinery, so the poem moves at the pace of someone talking lazily rather than reciting. Enjambment does most of the work. "Deep as drunken scholars" breaks before "in the grass," so we read the scholars first and only afterward find where they have fallen. "Enough for all" pauses on its own for a beat, a small act of reassurance, before the last line complicates it.
Sound does what rhyme would normally do. "Deep" and "drunken" share their opening d, which makes the phrase sound slightly slurred. "Scholars" and "all" share a soft l that returns in "conversation that lives," while "gas" in the title and "grass" in the second stanza are near-twins, one open vowel with the final consonant swapped or softened. The poem's puns live in these small shifts of sound.
Its imagery is deliberately mixed. Horses, bulls, grass and scholars come from two worlds, pasture and study, and the poem refuses to rank them. The word "mistaken" belongs to both. Being taken for a horse is an error of perception, but the poem seems to treat it as a compliment, since it means the speakers have shed the stiffness of being observed human beings.
Much of the poem's significance comes from this economy. In very few words it takes a grand literary inheritance, grass as a symbol of democratic, shared life, and brings it down to a hot afternoon, a bit of bad air and some tipsy talk. It stays modest and funny, and the humor is what lets the final claim land. If a field can hold "all the conversation that lives," then the poem suggests that conversation needs no lectern, only room and company.