Einspänner. A word with dual meanings—it’s a one-horse carriage or else it’s a hot espresso dolloped with cold whipped cream. This word conjures up the image of a coffee shop after yesteryear’s catastrophe—its odorless mark now invisible, yet pervasive—the way trauma leaves bruises under a dress. In a coffee shop, a guest left a row of paper cups adorned with watercolor portraits of women with red-frosted bangs, cat-eyed sunglasses, or beehive hairdos—you wonder, instead, who thought of layering cold whipped cream on top of piping hot espresso, and why is it a one-horse carriage, no less?

In the blaring incandescence of the outside world populated by dangerous ideas, did we offer our gratitude to the alpha and omega for honeycombs of light, those wax panes like windows to yesterday’s fields of clover, drowning our bodies in the sustenance of blessed rest, a part of the rhythms of life—why did we take this grace for granted? Why did we choose exile over a garden of innocence and get bound up in oppression and cynicism, no questions asked? Where do forbidden words go if we can’t say them? The word, einspänner, sits like a marble on my tongue, chilled foam atop an espresso—it yields no cure or remedy but saying it aloud in this room yields a measure of solace, as if the mere existence of its syllables imparts the promise of a world where a one-horse carriage or an espresso share the same moniker, driving home in this instance of humankind.

Translated in a dream, einspänner means I am spinning—like a planet, a girl lying down in a meadow after running, or the notion of a birthplace for asteroids, especially a cloud named Oort in outer space. I am spinning through the ages, the span of epochs. But why for heaven’s sake would anyone want to give birth to asteroids, I whisper to my dead clocks. Once upon a lifetime, a tenth of a gram of stardust arrived on this planet, and nobody noticed. Why does God care about anything in this universe, much less than a spoonful of asteroid dust and its decaying isotopes? If our scientists in the information brigade were to find water and carbon in a gram of stardust, will they plan on sending humans to the moon again? Where are the fields of crops they planned on sowing on arable land, the waterfalls and elaborate irrigation systems? Will they reproduce your name and likeness in an artificial lakebed? The little moss ball does not reply.

By way of negation, in a via negativa of the imagination, thanks to the data loss in the Registry, I live in the redacted spaces of thoughts. What might I find there, if I might grant myself the permission to repeat what I have already said, even if it is nothing of significance? Once upon a lifetime, a tenth of a gram of feathered silt arrived on earth in a pod sent billions of miles away to collect samples from an asteroid in an interstellar cloud where asteroids are born. I like the idea of a birthplace for asteroids, especially a cloud in outer space, but why for heaven’s sake would anyone want to do this, I whispered aloud to the dead clocks. Who cares about less than a teaspoon of asteroid dust and its decaying isotopes? As if clairvoyant, the information brigade ago droned on, explaining how scientists planned to analyze the dust to see whether conditions for life might exist elsewhere in the universe. If so, Marimo, mon amour, even if our scientists were to find water and carbon in a teaspoonful of stardust, will they plan on sending humans to the moon again? Where are the fields of crops they planned on sowing on arable land, the waterfalls and elaborate irrigation systems? Will they reproduce your name and likeness in an artificial lakebed? The little moss ball does not reply.

A gram of feathered silt,
a cloud in outer space
less than a brigade ago,
I whispered aloud to the dead clocks
and the universe
in a teaspoonful of stardust
your name and likeness.

With tariffs on free will and embargoes on human agency, we are all merely silt ghosts. God could blow all this away, the planet’s most beautiful lagoons and azure aquifers, in the blink of an eye. Meanwhile, the stars in the night sky will twinkle in their blessed immunity, sapphire pure and light years away from the riddled trenches of misidentification and populations of lost souls.

Go deep, intrepid ones of the future.
See how the blue yonder yields peace
in a watery meadow of rest, inequitable
with the ashes of this earthbound life
which cannot hold a candle to heaven
and its sea of transformative power.
To go deep, you don’t have to go
all the way to the stars. Go deep—
you don’t have to go far.