Weighing is what we do to things we want to understand, and Ram Krishna Singh's poem opens by trying it on the least weighable things there are: "the breath / the flame the soul or the ash." The list moves from living to dead. Breath belongs to a living body, the flame could be a life burning or a funeral pyre, and the ash is what remains. Each one slips from measurement, and the speaker admits as much. "I can't turn my inside out" is a plain confession that no one can inspect their own life from the outside. The poem is about the limits of knowing, especially knowing what life and death amount to.
The first stanza sets a trap and then springs it. To know "life's weight" you would have to be "lifeless", but a lifeless person can no longer know anything. The poem never spells out this paradox, though the phrasing "nor know life's weight when lifeless" lets it settle quietly. Then the body goes "between earth and sky" and "disappears one with / elements quiet." The line break after "one with" briefly leaves the body hanging before the elements take it in. The odd word order, with "quiet" placed last like a closing door, gives the sentence the hush it describes.
That oddness runs through the whole poem. It has no rhyme, no regular metre and almost no punctuation apart from one colon, which opens the first stanza like a door onto the speaker's admission. The first line is clearly a question ("How to weigh...") but has no question mark, so it hangs unanswered. The short, uneven lines read like thinking aloud, with pauses falling where the speaker hesitates. In the second stanza the lines break on "or" and "if," words of doubt, so the reader feels the uncertainty in the rhythm as well as in the sense. There is also ambiguity in "the ash / the body conceals," which could mean the body hides all of these things or only the ash. The poem seems happy to leave both readings open.
The second stanza turns from the body to a larger puzzle. The speaker imagines "the thread / or its mechanism that binds / secures life." Thread and mechanism come from different worlds: one is soft and handmade, the other is machine-like. The speaker cannot tell which picture is right, only that something holds life together, "now or / beyond." The poem does not say whether it believes in an afterlife, and I would not claim it does. It keeps the question open.
The final image is the most unusual. Instead of another abstraction, the speaker asks what if "I can't feel / the weight of the colour / on the leaves on tree." Colour has no weight, so the phrase merges sight and touch, and "weight" echoes the earlier "weigh" and "life's weight" and ties the whole poem together. The grammar is slightly broken ("on the leaves on tree"), as if the speaker's confidence were fraying. Then comes "maybe," which could belong to what precedes it or what follows, and finally the title returns as the last line: "shrinking into itself." The poem never says what "itself" refers to. It might be the tree, the colour, life, or the speaker's own awareness. Judging by the imagery, autumn leaves fading may be in the background, but that remains an inference. Because the poem ends without a full stop, the shrinking seems to continue after the words stop.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty. It does not offer comfort or a neat philosophy. It names its question in the first line, shows through paradox why it cannot be answered, and then moves from the abstract to something small and visible, a coloured leaf. That shift matters. The big mysteries stay out of reach, but the poem suggests that even the quiet fading of colour on a tree is something we cannot fully feel or measure. It works by making that failure of knowledge visible in language that is spare, hesitant and strangely gentle.