Truth Falling

The rain was a thousand silver needles threading the sky’s skin,

and through the trembling glass,

the old Marine watched an ant,

black as a bullet wound,

scaling the slick vertical of storm.

Its legs purchased defiance into the downpour,

as if gravity were just another battlefield to outlast.

Why cling to the impossible?

Why not fall like a leaf that’s learned to trust the wind?

The man’s fingers curled around a cup of cooling espresso,

Arthritic ache pained like old questions,

each knuckle a scar,

each sip a silent surrender.

The ant moved with the certainty of myth,

as if it had read the script of existence

and found no footnotes.

The vet, once fluent in the language of orders and oaths,

now stumbled through the syntax of survival,

his memories a muddied trench of broken metaphors.

He remembered the war not as a place,

but as a color,

the rusted red of amputated dawns,

the gray of letters never sent,

the blue of a buddy’s last breath,

folded into the flag of forgetting.

He tapped the glass,

a salute not to courage,

but to the absurd grace of persistence

as he stepped into the rain,

not to escape,

but to dissolve.

And as the clouds parted like curtains on a stage,

he realized: perhaps the ant was falling all along,

and the climb was just a beautiful lie.