Fallen Sky begins with a body already functioning on its own terms: “Breath arrives / without effort.” Soon “Names dissolve,” “No signal sent. / No answer waits,” and finally there is “Nothing left / to defend.” The Buddhist reading is not that a person dissolves into some larger cosmic substance. It is that the things normally defended as self—name, history, position, image, ownership—are seen as conditioned constructions. When they are no longer treated as a permanent core, the defensive reflex loses its object.
There is an early Buddhist image of four mountains closing in from the four directions, crushing everything in their path. The king who hears this is asked what could possibly matter under such conditions. The image is old age and death: no status can negotiate with them. Fallen Sky stages the same pressure cosmically. “No direction. / No return.” The point is not despair; it is the stripping away of strategies that depended on permanence.
The final line, “Only love remains,” needs a specifically Buddhist reading. It is not saying that love is an eternal substance underneath the universe. It works better as non-possessive goodwill—mettā—after the need to defend “me” and “mine” has weakened. An arahant can care without turning care into ownership. “Echoes fade. / Love stays.” What stays is not a self behind experience, but the possibility of responding without greed, hatred, or delusion.