They tumble in me like buttons,
connecting what has to be connected.
For closing shirts and blouses,
putting sails to masts.
Closing books that have passages,
life stopped here, writing messages,
commemorating rain and voices.
Words, boxes and cups
and bottles and crates of words.
Holding space and time together.
Trailing in the air,
written in the sand,
carved on the pages of trees
in the furrows of their bark.
Words chipped on stone,
left in snow,
the scrimshaw of sea and bone,
even when time began,
in the beginning
when the word was
prologue to everything.