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Calm sea today. Seeing a plank wash in
from a wrecked pier, I asked if all I’ve lost
could slide back whole, upended in the tide.

Waves rushed to answer no, with broken shells,
cut spirals, empty mouths, and bloodied seaweed.
Then a perfect starfish, color of fire,

star fallen from the sky into this bay
unshattered, beached, with arms still raised to grip 
some rock and right itself. The water rising,

images flowed in: our trek through snow, 
hot sake “for the warm,” and oh, the music—
not as a structured story, but in fragments

disrupted, like news photos, here and gone.
I’ve come to catch an osprey riding air; 
the primrose counting coins at the edge of sight;

things that for one luminous moment, last,
aware that nothing, not a starfish, 
not a star, fallen from the galaxy,

can live beyond the crumbles of its life.