an explanation for the silence:
of stars, embarrassed hope, time's contumely.

Always too the questions beside themselves,
quicker than our nimble moves to unbutton

their too tight fitting constrictions.
After loss especially, feeling for your

own sad pulse you wish wasn't there,
light too heavy to escape the event horizon.

We sometimes call that ecstatic void
our soul. Full of density licked to fury

by the winds of coming and going
to and fro in the lowering stellar air where

calm and chaos whisper advice both,
as we listen hard to inhabited contradictions.

Our houses slide off crumbling hillsides,
eaten by the sea. All this movement carrying us back

to lives of water where only yesterday we came
from, dripping God from our loins. Not to be confused

with our also rising in perfect starlight, steep-turning angels.
Or as in the glint of flying fish. Their impulse

for racing above calm or turbulent waters with
a message we only wish to understand, unravel

through thinking, breathing in salt-flecked wonder,
entering fleeing forms of being or becoming.