in memory of the 239 passengers aboard Malaysian Airlines MH370,

which disappeared on March 8, 2014 

I.

Language was the flight that disappeared.

At first the sky seemed strangely bare:

not like a coat with one lost button,

but a universe of coat where the button

has never existed. Soon, there is panic.

Because no one can close the universe

so it keeps flapping open and swelling

with cold.  In the center of the button

there are threads, torn from the rest

of the coat, looping around each other

like hearts. The search begins in earnest.

Was the button loose to begin with?

II.

Within that question, needled by wind,

you rewind and fast-forward through

starless regions of the brain. Try to pin-

point to the second the flight’s last

heard of transmission. What was said,

by whom, why those words? Listening

to what you think was there, what will

neither reproach nor acknowledge you.

(Or is it air that has fastened its ear

to the walls of your soul? Is this God

saying goodnight?) This is how you fill in

the hole: with a lineage of broken sound.

III.

Then radar, and the work of spinning

heaven-bound bodies, which inform you

the flight wandered far over uncharted

waters. How? Who would steer it there?

The universe is beginning to feel like

nakedness. You tape paper over the cavity,

prick it with a hundred possible sightings.

Pattern will be your salvation, even as

your pulse moves through shark-infested

murk, aching to collide with damage

you can touch, taste. This is how the sea

you didn’t know was you, becomes yours.

IV.

For a brief time, the flight’s black box

sends out pings. When it is silent, there is

nothing but grief.  The sky forever

blue and you beneath it, a cut thread.

Sometimes you dream you are the black box,

waiting to be raked up from the depths

to speak to that open wound, what happened.

Would you be able to wear the world then?

Would it embrace and warm your body?

Once a language was flung into the air.

Despite an extensive international

search                    no trace