Amnesia

Brocken Inaglory, "Fossils in a beach wall," 2007

Like a beach wall that’s sun-struck, then chilled, then
baked by the sun again, I’m spalling. All my memories –
(sedimentary, additive, a soft entombment of all those
drifting everythings that slowly settled to the bottom
of my evaporating seas) – are flaking off, and I split as
if struck by a hammer, crack along fissures too fine to
be seen by any eye. I forget my name (it’s on the tip
of my tongue), forget how to listen to the collective
that makes a self, the commensality that binds itself
together by chemical whisperings and handfastings.
And yet, even without listeners or listenings left, at
the long blank broken facings of amnesia, something
new pushes up in the interstices: something like love.