Because, now and then, for the well being of your soul, you have to evict the empty diversions, addictive distractions, the noisome bile, and ponder, in the brief space exhumed by an image, a note of music, a spiraling leaf, a stranger’s touch, a kindness, a child’s wonder, Earthshine married to sliverous Moon, in this volume of relief, this anomalous bliss, this sudden expanse of silence—how is it that we, somehow, have willingly mongered purposeful calm for mindless glitter, mere noise?—and reflect on the inverse of nothing.

Windows wide,

birds chirping front and back,

Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony

fills the house.

Life could be worse.

I write

Into the void.

Transient, ephemeral, aperiodic,

Sharp.

Null hypothesis. By assumption

Not significant. You are

Alone. Free. Leap

Into the ether, the abyss —

Into the void.