Now I could not remember what I’d done. I could not remember that I did not remember where I’d been forever or what the bodies had become among the night where knives were every understanding. I was all hours at the same time in every current instant of our lives arrived. I was in the homes beyond the idea of having lived. I was eating dinner or touching paper or swimming under sun or taking a child toward a machine to learn to read again a new way or was teaching myself another language to say what to someone else or I was at a desk staring where light was or I had hid again my eyes. It was all of any of us at once that made any of us nowhere else, held in the motion of any aspiration.
I thought to touch my face then but I did not. I felt something in me at last growing eons older in one instant, like any instant, and from the light I looked away. I stood there for some time then feeling nothing; I stood there waiting in the white unfurling hot and hard around all shape without intention or utterance demarcating. Some other of me in me tried to turn around and go back the way I’d come inside the world to now but when it turned around there were again the walls; where the world as I’d never understood it had moved again to fill the space behind me, so that where I tried to move on from what I was or felt again there was nothing but more of me, the erased eras in me going slump in spindles and pressing at where my nape and back and skull were just more flesh waiting to be smothered.
The world was what had lived. Within each inch there were colors; the colors each pixel held a sea; buried in the sea another kind of time under old blue lard of reckless dreaming; in each world, people wide awake, spreading flesh as they went aging around the holes of them that did not age or bloat. Overhead in every instance of right now the sky was caving; a second sky beneath that was more the way I’d once remembered the one we watched as ours, its dimensions bulging in soft places, puckered, growing in against itself, all the icons of every era swelling in against me with the world at once compressing into the sound of every recorded life. It was all of us and always had been, just like this. The eye saw.
Held in the eye, I felt us speak.
It was the same voice I’d heard traced through my whole life up to this point, though where before that voice had always been only me, now it was unending and breathless.
I couldn’t hear what the voice was saying through its layers, though I could feel it in my fiber.
The words weren’t words, but landscapes, mounds. I was looking up and I was up there and I was looking far down into our mud, and I was in the mud and all directions, and when I looked again above us I saw
countless suns
And beneath the suns I saw
the soft ground rising
I saw it piling all around, the house and the voice and my mind becoming comprised in the husks of anyone’s mortal remains, the memory of the person once carried in those husks, the mottled mass of presences inert and passed on pressed together full, waiting impossibly for every hour ever to return into the flesh of all the rest of us at once wherever with our common images split down the center writhing.
And I saw the sand again around the old world becoming buried in the sand of what my world had become
the sand of all without horizon
And as we spoke I saw the sand again falling away
And I saw
all negations
And I saw
agelessnesses
I saw
no walls forever in our love
And I did not need to understand.
In us, the shape of any sky was rubbing upward, sucking in nothing. The ground erupting antigravity and light. The light louder than it was actually. Planets were everywhere: dissolving, without surface.
Nothing had ever happened.
And from the sprawl I saw
the light blown open
I saw
no color rising underneath us
in time dividing
tunnels to nothing
Way out along the long horizon from where any form had been, the face of day split wide.
Our eyes were changing.
The eyes in mounds of eyes without pupil, lens, or image.
And I saw
no beginning & no end
And I saw
nowhere
I could not see more than in long fits and whorls, because of what had happened to the light.
I did not want to see, but what I didn’t want was as much me as what I had been.
I had no skin. I had no organs.
Each instant wore through all our lives.
The walls around the words we could not remember rose beyond us.
Light fell into time fell into flesh fell into speech; word fell into syllable fell into letter; z fell into y fell into b fell into a; shape fell into line fell into dot fell into gram; kilometer fell into meter fell into millimeter fell into volume; home fell into house fell into den fell into bed fell into frame; film fell into picture fell into pixel fell into color; body fell into sternum fell into ribcage full into bone; skull fell into brain fell into memory fell into where; 1 fell into 0; you fell into me fell into us fell into we fell into I; now fell into now.
Now was the color of all our skin and sins and fingers. Of water and oxygen elapsed. Every film at last erased, all books cured of their language, all ideas of their ego.
There was no longer any other voice. They were all my voices. Sound and light unfolding in the skin of nothing. Not a present moment as much as a pyre on which the world turned, all the sand not sand but breadth combining in reverse, where from out of the land the smoke of the dead of the land each node of creation ate back onto every inch it’d never been and always could have.
And in the thrall of all, I closed my eyes again where I no longer could see.
And I saw
Against the flood of where the eye was, I turned to face in total silence what the world had left behind a final time. Through white so bright it crushed itself by simply being, I saw where every inch of now touched every color grinding in the ground broken and blown apart. Where as I turned the air around me smiled and nodded and said the words I’d said already back into me again in a language without nature, and as I turned back, nothing held. No kind of sight but what the light was.
I could no longer tell any difference between the world and what I knew. Between myself and you or anybody. Between the eye and our skin and what sky. The lack of color matched our worship without surface. No way back and no way out of nowhere being dreamed. No belief but in every faith we hadn’t lived and held within us, between anyone and zero.
I closed my eyes a final time. Inside my head the dead within me began glowing; they grew inside me with great force, dressed in the long white hair of no one, and in the eyes behind my sight I felt the glowing filling up itself like future hearses. I felt the eyes close inside the eyes again, the dark among them erupting definition.
The light was screaming between voices, mine and no one’s. Any inch of where we’d been appeared not glown by glow, but cut into the grade of the sand of all of our remainder melting into the face of what remained.
The air where we were born filled in unwinding over fields of white on white, while underneath, the rimmed earth sung thick with the old poltergeists of our eternal seething seed.