The Lexicon of Branches

Wind has never needed words, yet speaks in spirals through the oak— each shudder a consonant, each sigh a vowel I almost recognize.

The branches are translators, bent and trembling with what they cannot say, their language written in a grammar of motion and return.

I stand beneath the canopy, pretending to understand, as if attention could become fluency, as if longing were a dialect.

But the message dissolves before it reaches meaning— all that remains is the hollowed feeling of having almost known something true.