Your
lives are composed of silence
delicate movements in an alien world
as you pick over the gravel stones,
searching for something wecannot see. ^

faces
We do not know how to see our faces in your faces.
^

windows
What does the glass look like
from your side?
Is it marked with the passing bubbles
from the hundreds of centuries
that none of us knew? ^

at us
What do you see
when we walk by?
Do you look at the coarse, swift movement,
the flash of an aqua silk scarf on the wind,
or the stillness of where we used to be? ^

in

It is the nature of glass to melt,
like slow water, gathering between the leaded panes.
But we all know this will take centuries. ^

Our
The pronoun keeps shifting, like the leaves under the waves--breathing simultaneously until the current lifts under us
separating the pale fronds of we into
you.
me.

When the water shifts again,
we coalesce into ourselves once more. ^

eyes
Stare through your bodies
as if they did not exist. ^

corners
Huddled against them, shifting
a scale here, a bright flash of food there
Knowing that once this is gone
the emptiness will remain forever. ^

at you
The plane of your existence
moves at speeds we do not understand. ^

staring
When we stop staring at you
Do you turn and speak to each other
Running your lives in a completely
different way?
Or are you as indifferent to our eyes
as you are to the sun's voices? ^

wholly
Our lives are separated between panes of glass.
Even the atoms cannot live on the other side. ^

without
It is this absence of things.
The complete mystery of what is not there. ^

understanding
There are things in this world
that are best left
unanswered. ^