Love in "Dead Leaf" is already over before the poem begins, and the speaker is the last to admit it. The opening line, "Why I can't give up on you?", is a question that never gets a real answer, only excuses: "I'm holding onto memories," "Am I being greedy?" The speaker tries "to repeat the last season," as if a relationship could be replayed like a favourite song. Then comes "I try to," and the line simply stops. That broken sentence is the poem's first honest moment. The effort runs out of words before the wanting runs out.
The wanting comes back in the second stanza through repetition: "I want you / who makes eye contact with me / I want you / who wants me again." What the speaker asks for is small, just a glance and a little desire returned, and that modesty makes the plea sadder. The word "again" gives it away. You only ask to be wanted again when you no longer are.
Then the central image arrives. Love becomes "dead leaves / that have fallen / and are flying away," and the speaker's love "collapes weakly." The verb is a good one even with its spelling slip, because "collapse" belongs to buildings and bodies, not leaves, so the image gains a sense of structural failure. The next stanza makes it physical: "If our hands touch / It feels like it's going to crumble." Touch, usually the proof of closeness, becomes dangerous, because a dry leaf turns to dust under a finger. The sky is "empty between us," and the emptiness is a measurable space between two people.
The poem's most interesting move is also its strangest: "You're my fifth season." There are only four seasons, and they run in a loop, so the fifth stands outside the cycle. It cannot be repeated, which quietly contradicts the speaker's earlier wish to "repeat the last season." The next lines complicate things further: "I can't get to see you / You're still look green to me." Green is the colour of spring and summer, of leaves that are alive. The poem suggests two readings. Either the speaker's memory keeps the beloved fixed in an earlier, fresher season, or the beloved really is still green and untouched while the speaker alone is withering. Both leave the speaker alone. The garbled grammar of "You're still look" reads like a thought tripping over itself, which fits.
The final stanzas hand the ending to the weather. "The wind blow / And everything drift apart / The rain pours / Until the last leaf left." Nobody is blamed. Wind and rain act, and the lovers merely drift. The phrase "last leaf left" is quietly clever, since "leaf" and "left" share their sounds and "left" also means departed. Then the rain turns into tears: "The dead leaves fall / Like the tears / Like falling leaves." The comparison loops back on itself, with tears like leaves and leaves like tears, and the circling mirrors a mind that cannot stop turning the same grief over.
Formally the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no regular metre. Most lines are only a few words long, and the diction is plain. That plainness suits the voice. The English is not always standard ("Why I can't," "The wind blow," "everything drift"), and whether chosen or accidental, these slips give the speaker a raw, unpolished sound, closer to thinking aloud than to composing. The short lines also leave a lot of white space on the page, which is a visual version of the "empty" sky between the two people.
The closing couplet, "This love / Is like the fallen dead leaves," is the flattest statement in the poem. After so much movement it simply states the verdict that the title announced. The phrase "fallen dead" is almost redundant, as though the speaker must say it twice to believe it. The poem's interest lies in the tension underneath. The speaker concludes the love is dead but still sees the other person as green. Autumn as a figure for ended love is hardly new, but the fifth season and that stubborn green keep this version from settling into cliché. It ends with a verdict the speaker cannot quite accept.