I opened the book and realized I couldn’t tell, every word having
become an abstraction of itself, colorless, if you call black on white
colorless; they spoke separately of themselves as if they had a voice
and together like the ocean at the cape in wind—
 
don’t get caught there at high tide, he said, but we didn’t see the sign
or we did but could not make it out, the words there abstractions
of a further meaning that made sense once. They are like architecture,
the words together, but the meaning of architecture is a cathedral
 
or roofless house, each suffering its own fate, finally not there.
His voice was tiny, the way voices are as they administer
the anesthesia. When we leave we will be like that, singular, so what
remains is a word, then an abstraction, and then not even that.