And memory itself is a house … it cannot endure.

                                                                           — Resil Mojares




When houses are built upon fingers

tracing objects texturally surreal
            yet intimate in shape, I fragile

            tenses of its edifice before
I walk to its welcome. With walls

cracking, a supernova entryway
            to elsewhen: finding the geometry

            of being not here, where vertices lie
as memory does to the nothing,

and a window is where the empty 
            lets itself in. I remember your myth

            about the etymology of gestures 
by the body before it becomes a box,

no corners for cohabitation, you say, only
            a metamorphic stasis. We unlearn

            this, as all that falls apart, because
in folklore: the soul turns box-like

and the body becomes animal
            traced in our night and hides

            in clouds by mourning. Framed
by our form of fission is what we keep

in this room where your beautiful
            corruptness is found in the seams

            of our fingers, and your yesterdays
say how we mistranslate the topology

of what will happen tomorrow.