The poem starts after the real event has already vanished. The speaker wakes from a dream he can't remember and is left with one stubborn fact: it has become "suddenly very important to breathe, and to go on breathing." Breathing is normally the least noticed thing we do, so the sentence has the feel of a small emergency. The next one, a fragment, sounds like a private pep talk: "To go on, despite fear, loneliness or depression." The three named troubles are listed plainly, with no drama, and that restraint makes them more believable.
The poem is built in two parts. A paragraph of plain, conversational prose is followed by a three-line verse. The pairing recalls the haibun, a form that sets prose beside a short poem, though the poem never claims the label. There is no rhyme and no regular meter. The prose moves like a thought being talked through, with a long, winding sentence about the stone, a parenthesis, and a quick reversal. The verse that follows is spare and lowercase and has no punctuation, so the shift in texture feels like a change of breath.
The stone is the prose's main image, and its details are carefully chosen. It is "too charismatic to just toss aside," a funny, slightly sheepish phrase, since the speaker admits he has "no reason to keep" it. He is moving out, or "was, before the pandemic hit." That parenthesis quietly shows how a plan has been suspended along with the ordinary future. The stone's fate is told in small steps: he puts it in his pocket, "a moment later" takes it out, and sets it "beside the trail for some child to find." The hesitation shows how hard it is to let go, even of something small. The stone's "red mineral heart outlined in yellow" gives it a body of its own, and giving the speaker's gift to a child makes the act generous rather than just tidy.
Then comes the allusion to Charles Simic, whose definition of a stone is "a mirror that works poorly." The line is witty, and it explains why the stone fits this moment. A stone gives back a blurry, dull version of whoever looks into it. It is solid and inert and has no inner life. The speaker thinks of it just after thinking of his own fear and loneliness, so the mirror idea tilts toward him. The stone gives back little of what he feels, and it certainly doesn't breathe.
That contrast prepares the closing verse. "Brachiate" is the title and also the first word of the verse. It means to branch, and it is also related to the way apes swing from limb to limb. Here it works like a command or a wish. The next lines, "as if my lungs too / might leaf out," make the central comparison. Lungs really do branch like an upside-down tree, with airways dividing into finer and finer twigs, and the poem asks them to bloom. After the stone, which can only be carried or put down, the poem turns to something alive that grows, reaches and renews itself. The small word "too" matters here. It suggests the speaker has been looking at trees or leaves on the walk and wants his own body to join in that natural process.
The word "might" matters as well. The poem doesn't claim that anyone is healed or that fear has gone. It offers a hope and leaves it open. The verse also has an odd, tender logic. Breath is usually what we take for granted, and here it becomes something we have to coax, like a bud. The mention of the pandemic gives that image extra weight, because lungs are exactly what a time of illness makes us think about. The poem never says so directly. It lets the setting do that work and keeps its attention on a single human gesture.
The poem is significant because it finds a way to talk about anxiety without raising its voice. It shows the effort of going on through a small action, leaving a stone for a child, and then turns that effort into a hopeful image. In the end, the stone is something we can pass along, and breath is what has to keep going.