I can’t remember how I felt myself falling in around us, pinched in the patient way of every instant’s instant seize as it passed in and on around all bodies to hold its shape forever as it had been and all remembered in the eye of what would grow, which was nothing, which did not stop it; the color blazing; where in the face of all this you could not remember anything about me besides how there was nothing left where I was not. I was the lip of the land where all we’d called ours went under water to stay hidden from the eye of god in fear of no longer having organs, each zilch becoming collapsed in proper sequence, its absence raised like humans packed in bleachers doing the wave; I was the larger wave our blood had begged to form at our whole ending as among the days in counting lost we sloshed, to rise and crest and crash and kiss against the idea of a home inside no home, to be holy, to go on.
I remember a silver necklace that when I put it on, the room went upside down and inside out, and I was sitting where you are sitting, awaiting anyone but me.
I remember the dream of living skin filling all possible space, all edges of all worlds, the dream replacing all other memory, without end.
I can’t remember that I remember nothing.
I come into the room and find the child. The child has no arms or legs or face or chest or hair or teeth or eyes. The child is lying on the bed, on the floor inside the house devoid of mirrors, as all the glass of them has lurched, become rooms there beyond the pane where before the house had ended.
I can no longer tell the difference between what the child remembers and what I remember, how we’d ever been apart. His presence burns me where I no longer have a body beyond the many millions no longer living, the hordes within them each.
I take the child and lift him to me. I cup the head inside my palm and speak: You will believe we are alive and well, for real, together, and everyone has found their love, that nothing could end our lives but life itself, no matter how it feels. No word ever of death again as yet but all this light and all this color in the ground and spots worn on our faces and the hours crushed with sleep with eyes closed on beds beside bodies recounting nothing of the mirrors underneath our skulls which when removed replace themselves with new skulls; and so here I am again and will be again all crushed forever.
The child says nothing. Its mouth is open, toothless.
I hold the child and was the child. I have the child inside me and I’m inside it. I sleep without sleeping and do not grow older and some time later I wake and rise. I stand in a cold darkness on the edge of somewhere else, seeing no mirror, beyond sun.
I remember standing with my eyes closed at a thin, warm window in the beginning.
I come into the house and the house is all one room.
There is a door in the room but the door is locked.
The walls are white.
On the far wall is a mirror. It is the same mirror I remember my wife brought into our marriage, inherited from her mother, which had hung on the wall across from our shared bed all our nights.
The mirror has no frame. Where the edges of the reflection end, the walls begin.
I close my eyes and touch the mirror.
The door inside the mirror is not locked.
The door leads out into the front yard where I find the sun is out and sky is pale. The trees are reaching out with arms I never knew. The house is whatever color I remember it having, which is no color.
There are no dead behind my eyes. No bells or hymns for the dead along the heavens.
The ground is soft. Or what seems like the ground is soft. Or what beneath it. Or all of what I am. And I am laughing. And what is laughter.
The light seems to close in and on down, blurred with its luster.
It is a quiet day.
I do not remember walking from the light.
I do not remember the shape of the world around me falling out around me and the warm grade of where I had fallen there into the wake of what I’d been as someone wider in a space beyond destroyed. There was some glass then there was something not glass then there became a different kind of texture altogether.
I do not feel where the wreck of what had been absorbed clings around whoever had been quaking, forming the aging of our skin: the cut of it collecting in one stride to sing a surface, and the paper, and the dust. Where no fire laps, the field turns over, and turns over, and there it is.
It is, regardless of what remains here or does not remain here. Something yearns, the way the mass of my body grows gold with old nameless layers. The space clocked between the lost organism of all our years in its own absence becomes more firm, and firming fast again against itself again and through itself again, squashing the pockets held in shelves among their collision. The air condensing what it is with what it has been and where it hopes to be again and who will let it.
Who is who to remember anything about any of us; each instant clicking in its own mind with each around it in no word; the body of anybody and all regardless glowing obese with old intention, with the want the words could not hold down, what desire could not beat the sense out of so eyes could see it in our houses, and so grew on babbling up in packets like a flagellum in all our fantasies combined. The gift of births born burst and eaten up wedged into cement or buried wide open on some paper, or vibrated brief through singing sacs; tapes untaped and white residing in the action slaughtered in a wake of all the music slaved by music.
Endlessly blood funnels through the years all nonexistent. I remember not to bear in mind the slurring rooms where we had been in crush; where the years were not here in the world; where I could see ahead a growing light wanting some little inch to rise upon; where I hear me let me know inside me where I was before I showed up here; and so I am late for my own presence, caught where my hair comes growing where the glass inside the house around the maze of making turns against what would have been my wishes; until at last I came aware inside me in my skin of an indention in the ageless perforation, some presence not a wall or air but nothing. I feel with my fingers there cursor shaped up like I am, of no era, ending any other instance all instantaneous, hitting hot and turning hard and strumming shut against my pretend sternum thick as what a dog is where he learns commands. Strobes of wakeless sound in which he learns to love the owner, needing no reason.
Inside the sound I am confounded in the history of any gesture. Against the silence of the graph of evening I knock hard with both hands this time against the absence of us again, where when I feel it touch against the space of any of me in the instant I feel my formation wanting bursting through the instant, my lengths inside me needing permission to separate from the memory of our bones deflecting light.
In you I know I knew I needed, I remember, though I cannot remember who I mean by you or I. I know I knew I needed the wash of sound to color through my gut, needed the blood of all our damage flooding from endpoints of my fingers and the cells around my head, where each time I blinked or asked to quit the hour my skin awoke and burned me so thick I could not stand, though I could float, and the pain made me come so hard I sprayed my face and could no longer remember who I was or what pleasure had brought me here again.