There were your lips
and the vinyl record my mother played
every Sunday, the smoky voiced one.
There was red nail polish seeping
into the frame at the left hand
corner, the plush carpet that may
have been moss, since I can see green
and smell the dampness I remember
from the way your body fell
on leaves that day in September
before I could dream
a hundred ways for you to die.

We start again with your mouth
and I scribble it in my notebook,
before its color and expression fade.
This is what I have been told
to do to understand what I think
of you and your not being here.
But the images move, will not
stay fixed in my mind. I cannot tell
if you are dead or alive, if I can
see or am blind and dreaming.
The world will not stay blurred,
will not separate itself into frames
and paragraphs. There is no cohesion,
no stickiness and everything runs
towards the inevitable end, the blackness
and my forgetting again.