To Mira
At Monterey Aquarium, we watched mackerel school where light refracted the world over our heads– sky, people, that brooding mimetic moon– bent impossibly over the silver minions, their shifting music we couldn’t hear, their long silent rhythm, form shifting into formlessness, the way you do now, your face flushed with the boy’s mouth until I can barely touch you as I once did, my loneliness no longer allowed to break like water against the frail vessel of you. There is no justification here, as in the way starlings leave the long darkness of our fall, buoyed in the lifting wings of each other beneath the stars’ compass, our yellow cottonwood speaking the language of wind between us and this leaving until their shadow that finally is the fall breaks over us. So long now, since I touched the braille of your skin, the late moon keening her vowels through that early window. Human frailty, I think, loving that naming of you without the tongue, your body —
shadow light shadow —already breaking
across my hands into nothing that stays.