None of this will be remembered.

A pair of headlights pans
the bedroom's walls. And the moon

we might wish to take note
of these two lives, it has no mind.

The air our chests exile
stripped of its oxygen, it will tell

no one. And so
what if it's written here, and there

comes a moment, somewhere, someone
we'll never know who sees,

through the dark apertures of these lines,
we breathed for each other? How

is that to remember? No,
not even when I, tomorrow,

call out of myself and the air
the dream of you now—not even

when, after seasons together,
I'm blessed again to reach for you

in the drift that follows the last
communion here in this bed—it won't be

the body and blood of what's gone. No,
these forms forget themselves. Haven't you

felt the tiny snaps of the slippage,
the itch inside you of fibrils

rupturing in the time-simmer, fragile
tenacious microarchitecture

of bridges between instants snipped,
life's heat severing its own

recall? No, this also you won't
remember. I'm thinking of stilt houses

holding out on a typhooned shore,
ocean and sky churned wild

on human smoke—a day later,
where was an island, the water's

unreadable face. I once saw
a band of scoters boil a lagoon

as they dove—the surface closed
over, the froth resolved, no trace.

They rose elsewhere. Somehow,
though nothing returns, again

and again it's the world. Take my hand
now. You are warm to the fingertips

by our two fires. And nothing else
but the present burns.