in praise of I don’t know

by Maya Stein

Mostly, what washes up at the beach isn’t whole, though our eyes are peeled
for the perfect form of, say, a perfume bottle, or an old coin, or a message from the dead.
Instead, what reveals itself as the tide pulls back is a sea of uncertainty, cryptic shards
with the vaguest clues whose answers are scattered in places likely too far from here.
We will never retrieve them, not in the way our mind craves assembly.
But look how, against the late season light, a filmy beauty descends, nearly silencing
the clamor of what pulls at our sleeves to solve. What if we could let ourselves rest
for a little while in this halo of I don’t know, feel its soft touch against our urgent skin.
What if the thing in our hands, and every fractured remainder, is its own answer. What if
leaning into the wobbly shapes of our lives is another kind of sweetness and gold.

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Printed with kind permission of Maya Stein