Distance Without End

The last breath of a cello slips into a subway tunnel,

its echo a moth made of glass,

fluttering through the static of lost Wi-Fi signals.

We mistake this for silence. But silence is just sound wearing a cloak of distance.

A Steinway’s final chord liquates into the ice of a melting glacier,

 its resonance trapped in the throat of a polar bear’s dream.

 Pavarotti’s high G still ricochets off satellites, whispering to Mars in a dialect of longing.

We forget the baby’s cry as easily as we forget passwords,

both stored in the cloud of forgetting.

The homeless wail becomes a ringtone no one answers.

A breakup sob is archived in the museum of unread texts.

Yet somewhere, vibrations braid themselves into the hair of comets,

into the pulse of streetlights blinking Morse code to no one in particular.

The cosmos is a DJ remixing our grief into the next sunrise.

And when midnight folds itself into a paper crane and flies backward through time,

we realize there was no ending,

only a hallway-like route where distance hums,

and the next door at the far end just opened.