Life's Enormous Green Chest

Air was here before us.

It loosens a corked bottle of wine the way dawn unbuttons darkness,

allowing hidden notes to rise from the glass.

It moves through forests, an invisible currency,

trees drawing in carbon's burden and paying back oxygen's wealth.

Late summer maples bargain with the wind,

holding their leaves like aging hands reluctant to release photographs.

The planet itself breathes, every field, reef, marsh,

and woodland part of a vast green chest rising and falling beneath the sky.

But…

Air gives no guarantees.

A salmon, flung bright as a spilled coin onto a boat's hard deck,

gapes at the atmosphere that nourishes the fisherman.

Its gills open and close like broken bellows searching for a forge.

What sustains one life can end another.

A silent gas leak slips beneath a door like an assassin wearing perfume.

A hurricane gathers its spinning muscles

and hurls houses as though they were toys.

Cyclones knead oceans into walls of water.

Even great aircraft, those aluminum certainties,

can be tossed through invisible turbulence

like leaves trapped in the throat of the sky.

Still…

Every living thing resists surrender.

At birth, lungs unfurl like parachutes over a strange and brilliant country.

The first breath ignites us.

Oxygen pours into the blood,

a bright caravan of fire, while carbon dioxide,

the spent ash of living, must leave for life to continue.

Inhalation.

Exhalation.

The oldest tide.

Years pass.

Muscles weaken.

The heart slows its drumming.

And somewhere ahead waits the breath

that cannot be followed by another.

The moment oxygen no longer answers.

The moment the body releases its claim upon the air that carried it.

Yet perhaps the final absence is not the tragedy we feared,

but a doorway opening inward,

where the last unanswered question steps from shadow into light:

What comes next, after the breathing ends?

Perhaps the poetry of air knows?