Breath

For a long time
I did not notice
how carefully I was breathing.

Not the way a swimmer breathes
between strokes,
not the way a runner gasps at the hill,

but the way an animal breathes
when it suspects
the forest is not safe.

Small sips.
Measured air.
A kind of politeness toward the atmosphere.

As if too much oxygen
might be taken back.

I lived like that.
Chest lifted but never opened.
Ribs held close to their own shadows.

I told myself
this was faith,
or discipline,
or devotion.

But the body knows
what it knows.

It knows the difference
between praise
and suffocation.

One day,
no thunder, no sign.
I stepped outside
what I had been calling home.

The sky did not split.
The ground did not argue.

There was only wind.

And it entered me
without question.

I stood there
like a field
after years of careful fencing.

Air moved through me
the way it moves through tall grass
without instruction.

In.
Out.

Nothing more exalted than that.

I did not feel holy.
I did not feel certain.

I felt oxygen
finding its way
into rooms I had kept locked.

There are mornings now
when I wake
and the first thing I notice
is that I am breathing
without fear.

The sparrows do not ask
why I left.

The trees do not inquire
what I believe.

They are busy
turning light into leaf.

And I,
at last,
am busy
turning air into life.

It is an ordinary miracle.

The lungs open.
The world enters.

And for today,
that is enough.