Of Passing

All the wild things I tried to hold were to me, small beacons of meaning.

I bunched them in my palm, blinking from the fountain floor.

Now here, I try to hug my child at a party

and she pulls away, saying with the force of her young body, 

‘I am not your meaning.’

I found a friend's book decommissioned at the library.

It was on a shelf between Ulysses and a paperback copy of the King James Bible.

Somewhere, on some desk you’ll never know,  

the book of your own life is being stamped in red.

Each day I wake to hear tall trees speak their names.

To watch the platypus rounding in the water,

its sleek brown bill nosing at the world.

I find something of myself in the bird wing, in the fossil crest, beneath the leaf rot.

But walk by walk, it's clear that none exist for my purpose—

each as busy as I am, with the work life leaves.

Sometimes I despair for answers. Mostly, I am happy to have arrived. 

To have stood beside the spinebill. To have made a sound.

In the fist of worlds, there exists something else’s story.

Out there on the far edge of things, something may dream to know us,

Or glance. Glide on. A passing bird.