Each of the three short stanzas opens by telling us what the speaker's father *was*, and each answer sits a little further along in the season. First he is an autumn tree, then a maple, then a fire of leaves. The past tense gives the poem its quiet meaning. Nothing here says the father has died, but the poem is clearly mourning him, and it does so by turning him into weather and landscape instead of naming the loss.
The repeated opening, "My father was...", works like a refrain in a children's rhyme, and the first line even has a near-singsong beat: "My father was an autumn tree." The poem has no end rhyme, though. Repetition does the job rhyme would do, as when "tree" returns in the second stanza. The rhythm also shifts in a telling way. The father lines are short and balanced, almost chanted, while the sisters' lines are longer and plainer: "My sister and I made a house of leaves." The father is described in the language of image, and the children respond in the language of action. They build, they learn, and finally they live with what remains.
The imagery rewards slow reading. "All his colors gone to ground" does several things at once. Colors fall from an autumn tree, but "gone to ground" is also an idiom for disappearing or going into hiding, and "ground" suggests burial. Vitality, brightness and presence all drain away in a single line. Yet the sisters build "a house of leaves" from this wreckage. Judging by the imagery, the girls make shelter out of what he leaves behind, and the child's game of play-building sits very close to grief.
The second stanza is the coolest and most ambiguous. A maple that "no small girl could climb" suggests someone grand, and perhaps distant or unreachable. The poem does not say whether he was cold, absent or simply too large to know, but the phrase leaves room for a more complicated love than pure sentiment. It is also worth noticing that the speaker shifts from "my sister and I" to the general "no small girl." The personal memory briefly widens into something almost universal, as if this is how all children experience their parents' height. Then comes the most important phrase in the poem: "learned to let go." It works on three levels. A child lets go of a branch she cannot reach, leaves let go of the tree, and the sisters let go of their father. One small verb joins the natural and the emotional worlds.
The final stanza changes the pattern, and the change matters. After two stanzas that each end with a line about "my sister and I," the closing lines drop that phrase and turn to "our winter houses." The two girls have grown into adults with separate homes, and the childhood house of leaves has become houses of a colder season. The title, "Burning Leaves," fits here, since burning leaves is a familiar autumn ritual, a way of tidying the year's decay. The smell, though, will not tidy away. "The dark scent of smoke / lingers still" gives grief a sense of smell, which is often the sense most tied to memory. "Dark" is an unexpected word for a scent, and it blends touch and sight into smell to suggest something heavy. "Still" is ambiguous in a useful way. It means "even now," but it also means motionless, as though the smoke hangs in the air and does not move.
The poem's seasonal arc, from autumn tree to fire to winter, tracks a pattern of grief. First there is the loss, then the long learning to accept it, and finally the permanent trace it leaves. The date given with the poem, October 2012, suits that autumn setting, though the poem's images do not depend on knowing why it was written.
What makes it memorable is its restraint. In under forty words it manages to be tender, uneasy and quietly final. There is no explanation and no outburst. The father becomes a tree, a fire and a smell, and the sisters, in the end, simply carry the smoke home with them.