ALT IRRADIANCE Scientists say the brain cannot form new memories immediately before falling asleep. In those moments, it's possible I've forgotten entire countries, the sound of poppies opening in light breeze. I've forgotten the low notes your voice reached in darkness, the delicacy of my name when it left your mouth. 86 billion neurons in my brain, yet rapture unmapped somewhere in the cortex To learn this body's dialogue, I must relearn the memory of eating, memory of pine trees sheathed with ice, memory of everywhere except a mountaintop, memory of bruises on my knees. If I look from above, I can almost see the shade of the mountain but not its chokecherries, not the deer hiding below the tree line. A shift in color perception: what I thought was verdant and stream, now gray, now white, now snow. Snow as if made by accident, I slept into the gray afternoon as though clutched by air. In a new dream, your face assembling as the face of a person I recognize but can no longer name.

ALT I wake every evening with visions of books missing all their pages, honeycomb filling with silver. I take clothes and put them in boxes, biography of sweater and linen dress, the bad folding. Cotton already forgetting what body once gave it shape, what hands once made it tear and sewed it back together. In Russia, the corpse of a newborn mammoth named Lyuba now exquisitely preserved, illuminated on display. Glacier ice kept its hair intact, its cry locked inside its throat. Little mammoth baby teeth, dried mud around the trunk. A life confined to one continent, one age, now traveling into warm places. Wild animal I never saw now in my memory, now a day in my life that happened. That last summer, the lake serene as starlight, it was as if you were a stranger, a fugitive speaking a new language I had yet to learn, I had forgotten. Vocabulary of imaginary August, Vocabulary of research and keys. In your house, I find bits of butterfly, buttons, cardboard boxes filled with letters heavier

ALT between that whisper-dark night and this one, or the next one? Vocabulary of interludes and museums. Vocabulary of planetary clusters. "You won't feel a thing 39 the body says to the brain in the face of sleep or seasons, or synapses, firing slow. In different beds, I once dreamed the same dream for ten years. Cornfields in summer, a dog tied to train tracks. My brain blocked the nucleus of the memory. (Nostalgia for the house turned to marble stone, wrinkles around your ears.) Let forgetting begin, let each breath be a theory of glass breaking in a field. Only clocks endure. Let me memorize your voice and promise to come home.