Sestina.

(Look it up, fo', if you don't know it.)

I have a friend who couples himself with the wind:
arms spread, eyes shut, the rushing air
renders him fluid.
He senses these flurries, knows each leaf
as it floats toward the dirt.
His eyes radiate all the time.

He told me to ignore time,
to let the wind
decide, to let the warm dirt
under my feet and the parting air
tell me when the sun shines. Meanwhile, I leaf
through the pages of my fluid

life, my body a mass of indistinct fluid,
my head always eager for more time.
Some days, I notice a leaf
flowing through space, a product of the wind
I’ve spent my life asserting. I imagine air
extending along moist dirt,

the dirt
compacted by rain, overwhelmed by mud-hard fluid
keeping it from change. While I envy the air,
I see myself in this dense ground, a captive of time
never released by the wind.
When I return to the leaf,

its shape becomes more ambiguous, a leaf
of continuity elongating itself by choice, one weary of the dirt,
ready to shake off the shadow of its past in the wind.
I think of my friend in these spans of fluid
arrival removed from time,
pretending his avowals define me while outside the air

churns in rapid denial and I must face its honesty. “The air
is you,” he once majestically said to me, fingering the ridges of a leaf.
And I would believe him, had not the power of time
rushed the lush forest of my mind into the dirt
and isolated me from life’s fluid,
organic design. Still, the wind

calls for me, whose steady breezes wind the air,
rustling trees with a fluid reach that caresses each leaf
while the dirt waits, cemented by time.