Returning

I say I am leaving,
but the word is too certain.

What happens is simpler.
The body loosens its hold.
What was gathered
begins to separate.

Breath goes first.
It was never mine.
It passes back into the air
that has carried all breathing things.

Then the rest.
Not with drama.
Not as in the stories.
But as a quiet agreement
between matter and time.

Rain will come.
It will move through what remains.
The ground will take it in
without preference.

Roots will follow their work.
They do not ask whose body fed them.
They draw upward
what is given.

Leaves will open.
Light will pass through them.
Something of me
will take part in that brightness
without knowing it.

This should be enough.

Yet the mind resists
what it cannot accompany.
It imagines distance,
a long travel outward,
a return in another form.

It imagines fire.
The star consuming what has been.
The scattering again
into what has not yet taken shape.

Perhaps this is true.
Perhaps not.

The earth does not answer.
The sky does not confirm.

What I know is smaller.
And more difficult.

That I was here.
That I was given a body
for a time.
That it belonged to the same order
as rain, leaf, and stone.

And that to return it
is not a loss
the world can recognize.

Still, there is something
that refuses to close.

Not belief.
Not hope.

Only a quiet consent
to what continues
without me.

If there is a return,
it will not be as I imagine.

If there is none,
this is already enough.