you will allow yourself several moments of grace before entering a room.

and we will forget the old ways,
not all at once, but piecemeal.
seconds will escape, one by one at first
and soon they’ll join hands and walk away from our consciousness freely.

when we come to,
we’ll look first at our fallow hands
and then to the ruins of former empires.

so we stumbled quietly into fields and put down seeds.