Fortuitous

Stop telling me it’s nothing, this

that has fallen from a tree, a shedding

of old skin. Just stop the worn

saw of your life’s own emptiness.

Each morning you wake and breathe,

what a miracle, your lungs and heart working

all night long. The blood pulses in your veins,

the leaf unfurls and patters summer’s shining

tune, then falls in a kind of graceful undoing you see

as an end, foreboding settling in like the darkest

woods. But I ask you to stop excavating for some

meaning beyond this piece of birch bark,

with the staccato of babyskin sounding dark mouths,

tender hands of lichen holding it in standing ovation,

a thin green spire housing the red mouth of the inchworm,

who emerges only when you fall still, and silent.

All of it, I tell you, every single hand and mouth,

wants to speak to you, yes to you, right now,

in the language of the world.