Gravity

It’s a surprise, every
time when I see a beetle
but it’s really a brittle, curled leaf;
a thin stick but it’s a dried worm,
a bit of bumpy rock but it’s a
tiny toad and I wonder

are the seasons simply
inhalations and exhalations,
the pupils of my eyes
black holes; am I pulled
forever in because
even gravity cannot escape?

Is it a flattened squirrel
or shred of tire in the road?
Dung or a cicada casing?
Flower petals or tiny,
furry, white aphids, of a sort?

These ambiguities
shouldn’t surprise me–
after all, the solar system
is perhaps an atom
with its massive empty space
and small, orbiting particles–
like the sky and oceans of the earth
so vast and uninterrupted.
The carbon in my body
was formed in a star over
billions of years ago.
My organs or the earth’s:
lungs or rainforests?
Isn’t it all the same?

I breathe out spring,
aware after all
that sometimes all of life is the same
to the gravity of our eyes.

Loralee Clark lives in Williamsburg, Virginia. She writes poetry and nonfiction. She has had poems published in two anthologies as well as Broadkill Review, Literary Mama, The Binnacle, Penwood Review, Cape Rock, Grasslands Review, The Iconoclast, and The Sierra Nevada College Review.