With beautiful skin, a foreign language of skin, a surface heretofore unknown and pliant—

Oh, I am pursuing two contradictory directions at once because I am curious      We woke

and felt ourselves stretching out, and around us the smell of warm fennel     I was afraid I’d

be afraid of pain, I just didn’t know, and what with pain all along     A place made only of

rock and sky with a small stream wandering through     Who felt her fingertips grow soft

and sticky, like a frog’s and climbing walls up to     As a first beckoning, I agreed to a

dream in which my dog waited as guide     It was a house, you know, like a child’s drawing,

perfect peaked roof, glossy red     I wanted to take my grief with me and they said this was

not allowed, so impasse      And then the ease with which I changed from one body to

another, just as it was meant to be all along     Like a boat, only so much smaller than a boat,

completely obedient to current      One child held my head while the rest stood silently

by each of the limbs     In a sense, oxygen felt like food and I just wasn’t hungry any more,

at least not    You’d think when you go you could be in every place you’d ever been all at

once    Afterward, I thought, how strange the angles of the body, so brittle and odd      He

got there and we unfolded his palm that held a clutch of baby teeth and     Such a sense of

tranquility, to lie in a place where all you heard was the breathing of others     You could

drink as you swam in it, swim without tiring, slightly briny, slightly sweet     I could not

dislodge my foot from underneath her hip and I thought for what reason?      There’s no

describing the scent of it because terms like “pleasant,” “unpleasant” don’t      We thought,

oh, there’s the history—the narrative? The thing we hadn’t been     To be given a needle and

to make perfect stitches all through your own void      An entirely new pronoun     Like

Zeno’s arrow, like that, the miracle of increment and each stillness a repeating