Poetry by Request from a Boulder Street Poet

While visiting with family in Colorado, a bunch of us went up to Boulder for the afternoon, and wandered up and down the delightful pedestrian-only main street, replete with bars and cafes, bookstores and interesting shops, and a street musician or performer of some kind every 100 feet or so. 

I stopped by a tall, thin young man who sat stooped over a rather old portable typewriter, with a sign declaring he would write a poem upon request. He asked me a few questions about what I had in mind; I said things like: autumn, birch trees, or aspen trees, with all those bright golden leaves falling on the bare ground, a grove quiet and eternal, as if you were the first person to walk there in a few hundred years. And this is what he wrote, and I've tried to duplicate his line breaks and spacing:

   poem 
for 
 and aspen and birch grove in autumn

       yellowed leaves
    fall like
       ashes scattered
    to the ground

       by an old preacher
    humbled and
       sweetened by his
    years of
           practice,

       no longer holding
    on to his
       robes to justify
    himself,
            simply

       doing an ancient
    job with
       wrinkled hands
    and ageless
               spirit,

       ready to fall
    without
       regret into
    the roots 
         of next year's
                     aspen

--allan andre     boulder, co    5/18/13