POETRY: Telescope

I and the waves stopped crashing,

or the sound

didn’t make it all the way to the screen

door anymore,

and the silence was a

deep layer of black at the bottom of

the Pacific,

the most absolute form

of fog,

and the beach was drowned,

and the bluffs

crumbled and were never seen again,

and

the surface and the sky and all manner

of moisture coalesced into one long

humid moment,

bereft of focal points

beyond itself,

outside of time,

the stars

casting amateur reflections on the

plastic telescope we’d used to capture

Venus earlier after the sun died.