I listen to my heartbeat, to my breath, to my wife's breathing beside me, and I think, every night, of my father, a thousand miles to the north, breathing toward sleep, of my children breathing on the other side of the house. I listen to traffic, to wind, to whatever moves. Sometimes I can smell one of the blossoming perfume-trees that open their flowers at night. Maybe I pretend their perfume is becoming my body as I slip away into just breathing, away into the scurry of lizards and the mitten-like beating of moth wings. Sometimes I catalog shadows: lost teeth, a mattress stuffed with hair, the unwashed socks of someone who moved away years ago, painted-over windows, gestures that mean I am desperate for love, the ample darkness at the core of any solid thing. And so I am lost, and so I fall away, I peel away, I strip myself away and I myself am stripped away, falling into absence like an empty tide. Or maybe as I sleep I am rising in an elevator which stops between floors and just hangs there. Silence. Then maybe all the others on the crowded elevator start chattering a deafening cacophony. Maybe their clothes look like feathers as the elevator opens on nothing and they jump up, laughing, and seem to fly away in every direction as I look down at my unchanged body, as I step out into nothing (I can't stop myself), as I step out into silence, into weightlessness and perfect blue.

        II.

You remember a woman wrapped in white, sitting in a rocking chair beside a dark window. She rocks and looks out while she tells stories about people you've never heard of before, and she complains about windows and outside and white. Her breath clouds the dark window she looks hard into to try to see you in the reflection, standing behind her. You move around behind her, unable to decide what to do with your hands, with your body. You feel like touching her gently, saying something inane and untrue: it will be all right. But you don't talk. And she sings to you, songs you remember as she sings them. She tells stories about relatives and childhood. About cellars and crawl spaces. Who else can breathe underwater? She turns toward you and asks again. Who else do you know who can breathe underwater? She says she could live there, underwater. She says maybe she'd prefer to live there, away from all this weather. She asks if you remember nights you slept beneath her bed with your brothers and sisters. You remind her you were an only child. She insists you must remember. You breathed each other's breath. I tossed and dreamed alone above you. And you see now I've grown too old to live, too old to love, too old to sleep. There's nothing more to say. Where was your father? You can't remember anything. And so, as she talks on, you take off your clothes and lie down on that chilly floor, curl up and try to fall asleep, curl up and fall asleep until you aren't afraid of waking.

        III.

In my family, this woman said, we love to collect every kind of wild animal we can get our little hands on, our minds around, our dreams inside of--and we hoard them and listen to them and sometimes try to move like them. We dream well when we feel wild, no matter what animal we are feeling at the moment. And we sleep half awake, which is a pleasure, like love. Don't be shy: the sex is great, though we hurt each other sometimes. And sometimes we get lost a little and do things we shouldn't--and then we do them again. She took a breath. She said I love your ears, I love the hunger in your shoulders. Then she said I love the smells you leave, the bodies you seem to weave with your hands.

        IV.

--And the way your first true love's pale hands, delicately manicured, folded themselves on the table. The way she sighed contentedly, stood up and silently walked outside, to stand in the yard and look up at the moon. Which pulls us. The sleek way she unhinged her dress. Her pale body. And the way she lay down in the wet-cold grass, looked up into the night and started singing. The way you lay down beside her and pretended constellation expertise. The way moths seemed to beat against her body, and beat against her body, how they beat against her body, drawn toward that phosphorescence--and you think of her lying there, moth-tickled in the cool grass, and you ask silly questions as you reach out to not touch her. The way you walk out beyond trees, beyond shrubs, beyond grass, beyond muck: old refrigerators, cast-away tires, even nothing and the nothing that no one remembers, as though you were going anywhere at all.