Everything, And Nothing At All There's a train behind everything these days, like a humming tattoo underneath your skin, like the motion of emotion from love at first sight to the wood-like grain in the dream of loss. My brother is wading in a glass-littered stream over by the window we planted by the door. Do you hear him? He's singing, or cawing like some engine I've installed wrong in the back of my own head, a gimmick to watch myself watching things. We all stay the same, my good friend says, but our children keep getting bigger and older and strange. We're in that limbo period, changing inside where the whirring happens, where the gurgles never stop. And the fire you wore behind your eyes has faded now with the blue as the blue itself seeps out of things entirely, rendering us blunt and nearly confused. Memory exists outside the boundaries of your silence, eating the hallways darker, yielding nothing. How are you? Whoever are you? Mildew creeps across our teeth, where night swells new. I loved you when you spoke to me by simply muttering "you're silly, silly," and I loved you when you used my name as though it were a thing, utilitarian. Who are we, anyway, in this little life? I woke up in my bedroom and felt the dew soaking my hair. Who glances into you, sharp as any instrument, when the colors have just started fading into dusk? A tambourine is beaten by a crowbar in a virgin wood while someone you lust for collects eggs in the shadows. So you sing the mandolin song your mother improvised the moment you were born, the exact moment, in fact, you fell between her legs. Memories become you like trees become a forest, never making any noise unless the wind blows. Soon we will have vanished. We know there is nowhere to go but into the grain of things, into the dirt. Still, your teeth would feel good at the back of my neck, your fingers would feel sexy in my ribcage. So I offer you all the songs I know by heart, all the news I've created by simply living, a handful of glances and rebuffs. How many hours could you dance, she asked, without falling down or melting like snow? Whose life depends on it, I asked her then. Your own! Then I would dance for ninety years, then fall into that dark that is beyond that dark which is beyond. I'd say I love you. I'd tell you the self in my dreams is a grass man, a glass man, a song that found body by singing and then sang harmony and then harmony again--until, within these strands of song a body appeared, feathered and scaled and covered with human hair, afraid of everything and nothing at all.