Dark and airless there until opened, after eons--
no one having recorded the slow change since, though change
is all that has ever occurred.  Cavernous place, ancient gaping rooms so long

invisible and buried and in a timeless, unimaginable, unwitnessable dark:
a diary no one keeps, an unoccupied chamber where rock casts no shadow
as it grafts onto its slick-wet shelves,

where stone itself flows like water
only slower.  Solid, but stippled as if by the same flicker
as wind over ponds, those low waves

stay for ten thousand years, while still spreading.  How the light
changes everything.  Inside clasped covers, memories
you thought were fixed whisper like stalactites, slippery substances

of liquid calcite through the decades taking
their own shapes, separate from yours--whole series of new shapes forming
one by one, day by day, linked only at the source.  Later I might say,

Don't you remember how, in anger, I overturned
the table, spilling the tray, all its contents suspended for once
in the arc of their release?--but they are unstrung

to any steady present past because no, in fact it was you
angry at me, you who pushed the table, or in truth it was neither, only
we both said we would, or thought it, and now remembrance blames me

for writing it down as I must have believed it to be and then reshaping it anyway,
unwittingly, year after year, never looking it up, never looking back.
And all the while there has been a force, a spiral, the very birth of a life,

continual flowrock piling itself on and upward
from a single opening and spinning out of the ground
that lies in darkness underground, stalagmites in the cave.

No one enters that place.  Every hundred years, if you could return,
you'd notice more small growth, more rivers sculpting that sluiced stone,
more liquid rock shifting, dripping, in secret, though nevertheless

holding up the world we know.  How shocking, then, to discover the sexual pace
with which the familiar became strange.  So that when you say
that I am still the same--whatever can you mean?  Who was the one

who lived that life, there, in my own handwriting?  Look how,
since that time, it has poured like glaciers down the hard walls
of its pages, scrawled in the dark through niches of clawlike rock as if desperate

for a toehold, sculpted itself daily with the imperceptible elemental blades,
time-torn.  Now these sharp, fluid forms exposed:  so beautiful, frightening, so unlike
anything I ever knew or thought

I would remember.