The Grammar of Rust

It begins as a rumor on the hinge, an orange whisper the gate learns by heart, and the iron, once so certain of itself, softens into the dialect of weather.

A bicycle leans where a boy left it leaning, its spokes now stitched with the slow brown thread that sews all standing things back to the ground — patient, unhurried, fluent in surrender.

Listen: this is how the world forgives its tools. The plow forgets the furrow, the nail the wall, and even the bridge, that arrogant verb of steel, bows its grammar toward the river's mouth.

I have watched a kettle blossom into ruin, its spout a flower no one thought to name, and felt, beneath my own unhurried skin, the same red sentence learning how to end.

Let the bright things keep their argument with light. I will side with the corroded and the kind, with all that wears its passing on its face, and rusts, like me, toward the honesty of dust.