She’s had the first taste of the power of music and the experience of dancing in communion with others. The fact that she still has some cares to lose shows that she is still mentally invested in the capitalist structures of oppression like her day job and the social pressures that constantly say she’s wrong. But now she know she can lose these cares in the groove of dance.

Why specifically a maple tree? I don’t know. But it’s interesting the speaker recognizes there is a focus point where sex happens, where leaves fall. It happens only in a specific place and time. As suggested earlier, sex can only happen in a very particular context that honors its relationship with death and the darker parts of the human psyche. Yet he wants to return to that place because, no matter how traumatic, it has given him tremendous power he has never had before.

This is the first time the speaker shows any agency. He longs for that experience again, but this longing can only come after sex has happened to the speaker. His innocence was taken way, stolen from him, but it is only through this extreme act of violation that he can gain self-directed agency.

This line represents the poem’s coming-of-age turn. The boy has become a man, attained masculinity through an emasculating process. This is how structural power operates in this gendered system—you can’t have any until you’re initiated, hazed, and violated into it.

Much of my interpretation is built on the connection the poem makes between the leaf’s changing state and meeting the girl (stanza 2, specifically line 8) and supported by the image of the leaf as a phallic/genital symbol (Genesis 3:7).

The two things animating the leaf are both things he has no control over. Again, his first encounter with sex is vulnerable, powerless, passive, and decidedly emasculating.

December is the dead of winter. Nothing lives in December. It’s the winter solstice and the perihelion. Cf. Poe: “Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December; / And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.”

Yet this is where the leaf trembles again. The dissonance of death and life, decay and excitement, could not be made clearer. One way to interpret this is that the leaf trembles (i.e., this sexual energy thrives) despite the circumstances of winter. But an even more interesting take is that the leaf must tremble and be active only in the winter. The context of sex—the shame, the secrecy, the disappointments, the challenges of and within masculinity—is necessarily bound to this bleak picture of December and cannot truly exist without the backdrop of death (cf. le petit mort) and despair.

Their leave are touching, brought together, and wet as they kiss.

This further buttresses the interpretation of the leaf as a symbol for the speaker’s first sexual kindling.