Where we slept:           only a bed now,
sheets strewn with the thready bodies of vanilla
and a hole in the floor that ends far out west-
a wide mouth at the center of the Pacific,
taking on water all the time.

At night I curl my body to the hole’s wide arc,
and speak into its darkness any word I remember

honey, inconsistency, turbine

and I wait for sound to make its way back,
as reason, or paper, or tide-
are all words unteathered now,
the same as any seed, or made-up constellation.
They are imagined places where sound makes pattern.
They are all the shape of missing.

Maybe, the acid of the earth corroded us,
or the wet mold of winter,            or
like weather, we were simply absorbed
back into the sky and swallowed whole.
It is possible too, that we never happened,
or that we is not a number, but an idea that changed

itself into two grains of salt,
and scattered.