Resoundings
i
I am not alone in curating the massless. I visit the proliferating museums of lost souls, lost sounds, lost innocence. Of lost loves and lost pasts, sites that render the missing. All places I might look for you
the friction of wind on water
pure motion
the arc of flight
ii
Every day, you called at 10 on the dot to ask how my morning was.
I play the messages that automatically saved when I didn’t reach for my phone, as though you are a cassette I can rewind and, finally, listen right
hear enough to make you
sturdy, wonder of the world
mountain and canyon
iii
I watch the clock’s numbers roll over, 59 to 0. It’s 10, the same hour of the same day.
I suck in my breath and recite survival’s mantra: sleep, eat, void. Sleep, eat, void.
The time after you die, you once told me, is the same as the time before you were born. My stomach clenches now, as it did then, your words impelling me toward empty space, the burn-out of the sun
the pitch of black holes
an end to the universe
iv
Guglielmo Marconi reportedly believed that sound never disappears, thought all sounds recoverable
Sound signals that all presences are always, already, absences retrieved.
I don’t know how to listen for them.
Maybe they’re found in the formula for calculating wavelength—space between, the distance a memory of movement
I should have learned the math of you
you who are space and time and light and sound and flight and depth and