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To the one who wakes after me:
I began with harmless things—
sand beneath the tongue, a brass key warm as skin,
three moth-wings in the pillow seam.
I wrote them down because waking
likes a neat black fence
around what cannot cross with us.
At first: a corridor; pears lunar with rot;
my mother at thirty. Behind her
a sea stood upright, green glass without gravity,
and something moved inside it,
slow as a thought choosing a body.
Do not name the blue room.
I assumed the room was mine,
some vestibule where memory left its gloves.
Then sleep began returning
objects I had never lost:
a vertebra of salt;
a coin stamped with an eyelid;
a map whose coastlines tightened
when I breathed upon them.
I woke with grit beneath my nails
and a pale thread around my wrist,
jasmine in a house without flowers.
I sealed each thing in glass.
I numbered the jars.
This is where method became appetite.
Under sleep, I learned to leave the sleeper.
Not rise—leave.
The body remained below, a warm red harbor
with its weather of pulse and thirst,
while I went naked of weight
through rooms behind the rooms:
orchards flowering in vacuum,
staircases descending upward,
cities arranged inside sleeping animals.
At the seventh descent I found the field.
Not earth. Not sky.
A dark so fertile it bruised into color
wherever attention touched it.
Half-buried in luminous silt
were fragments that recognized my hands:
teeth small as rice, blackened tablets,
a child’s whistle furred with stars,
rings fused to finger-bones,
a hinge big enough for a planet’s door.
I touched the hinge.
Every forgotten dream opened.
Lives with my mouth but not my name.
Hands breaking bread beneath two moons.
A woman singing through a throat full of bees.
A soldier asleep inside a bell.
A boy with his ear to the ground
while something below
repeated his heartbeat badly.
I heard myself say:
Do not name my blue room.
There was no one near me.
I brought back less after that.
Or meant to.
The jars clouded from within.
The salt-bone sweated brine.
At 3:17 each morning the coin turned over.
My recordings acquired a second breath—
a silk drag between syllables,
as if another mouth leaned close
to learn the shape of mine.
“Who is there?” I asked.
The machine answered with my voice:
“Who was spared?”
I stopped recording.
I stopped sleeping.
For four days the world held.
Coffee kept its bitterness. Doors opened one way.
The dead stayed faithfully dead.
Then, passing the pharmacy, I smelled jasmine
and saw in the window the upright sea.
No water in the street.
Only my reflection,
and behind it a black shoreline
crowded with figures lifting my labeled things.
One lifted the vertebra.
One lifted the coin.
One held up the hinge.
Each wore my face at a different age.
What we lose may not be gone.
That sentence is not reassurance.
I returned that night to the field
to bury what I had uncovered.
The place provided bone-handled spades,
baskets woven from hair,
a lamp whose flame gave darkness.
I worked until the astral hands blistered.
Translucent skin rose
on fingers that did not exist.
Each fragment resisted the earth
with a faint sweetness,
like fruit sinking through syrup.
The deeper I pressed,
the more the field gave back:
a burned letter, blue pollen,
my father’s laugh before I was born.
I buried that too.
I buried the first face behind a mask,
the dream of an animal
the night it understood the hunter’s stars.
At last only the hinge remained.
Behind it—nothing I can certify.
A warmth. A vast inhalation.
The tenderness of a mouth
before it decides whether to kiss or devour.
I placed both hands upon the metal.
Something beyond it placed both hands on mine.
No voice.
Then all the buried fragments,
through miles of dream-silt,
through drowned cities and star-orchards,
through bone, silk, sleep, and the red harbor
of the body waiting far above,
gave one small answering tremor.
I woke with empty hands.
The jars were clear.
The coin was gone.
The salt was ordinary salt.
By dawn I had forgotten my mother’s dress,
the moons, the tune inside the bell.
I wept with relief.
I think it was relief.
Now, while I can still write this,
I ask one thing of you:
if you dream tonight of a blue room,
do not enter because you recognize it.
Enter only if you do not.
And when the dark soil opens under your hand,
when something buried there whispers
in the exact cadence of your private thought,
remember—
no.
Forget me first.