The Ginkgo leaves are soon to fall in East Grand Rapids MI, Mile 12985.

The Ginkgo leaf shall always remind me of the poet Donna DeMeyer, a Plymouth Poet. She could always talk great poets into driving long distances to read for her at the Plymouth Coffee Bean Company, on Penniman in that wonderful town with a village square, called Kellogg Park. One of the greatest, who drove all the way from Ann Arbor Michigan had tired eyes from long hours as a database administrator and a tool and die designer. I am speaking about Bob Hickok, who made cover of Poets & Writers and landed a professorship at Virginia Tech. I follow up on Donna, and I think she landed a job managing the 24 Hour coffee house. I imagine she is still called upon to read her poem, "In the Belly". She gave life to children, and two of them I met during our Writers' Workshops at the Coffee Studio, near a east corner of Kellogg Park. One of our tribe, a woman from Westland, wrote these mystical short poems that had a Zen loan touch, and I imagine her reading them to us around the table up in the loft, even as I dread to think of her as gone from our world. Any one else remember Anne E. Horvath? Maybe poetry's only reward is to be remembered by ones fellow poets. I once drove her van to take a group of us to hear Rita Dove at Marygrove University, Madame Cadillac Hall. That night, I almost backended a car on Seven Mile that just stopped in front of us for no reason whatsoever. She once gave me twenty dollars for fixing her computer, tucking it into my top shirt pocket, where the pencil protector should go. Her husband could fix anything without a circuit board.
I gave Donna a card with a Ginkgo leaf printed on front and a green Ginkgo leaf inside. We were both married at the time, but we went off on poetic roadtrips together, including to one at a coffee house in Ypsilanti, near Depot Town, is it?  A guy named Van Baldwin and she sat in a car for hours afterward, talking I suppose, as I drank in a Depot Town bar. I think it was Fall 1994, but I didn't keep careful notes on time then.  Van had a live in partner, a woman with whom he raised rabbits, so it was probably on the up and up, the talk in Van's car.
The Ginkgo tree loses all its leaves in a single day is the legend, but it usually takes a bit longer than that. I have felt that I have lost all my friends from that scene in a single day. My divorce proceedings led to my eviction from the marital home and I moved to Sterling Heights, far from that lovely Plymouth poetry scene. I lost that local feeling. Since then, I have been wandering, looking for the local feeling again. For the record, I did not sleep with any poet from that scene. For the record, I ignored the sparks.