Woe upon Mother Nature, that beautifully ambiguous pedagogue;

I sit listening by the fountain, in the empty lecture halls of the lakeside,

scrawling notes in the gravel trying to copy your chicken scratch;

the birds whistle

and scratch alien symbologies into the trees;

you steered glaciers

to clear the chalkboard for your blank canvas, left abandoned to the lichens

and moths that eat at the edges of old question marks;

I cup my ear to catch notes of raindrops you tap on my shoulder, but alas,

my poem grows increasingly puzzling, scrambling in search for some lingua franca;

Curse my apocrypha!

yet save them in an old notebook.

I’m sorry I tried.