Dave Bonta's "Respite" is about stepping out of ordinary time and finding a quiet kind of peace there. The first stanza puts us underwater, where a clock has "no time to answer to." Measured hours stop mattering. The image of something "naked as the hole in an ear" is odd and a little startling: it suggests a bare, open listening, a space stripped of everything except the ability to hear.
The second stanza lifts us from sea to sky. The speaker says "I am old like that," which seems to mean old in the way the sea and the tree are old: patient, settled, unhurried. Sitting "high up in a birch," the speaker doesn't look for answers. The questions themselves are "enough / to carry home." The mood is calm and accepting, with a gentle humor in it. The speaker seems content to leave uncertainty unsolved and take it along like a small, light possession.