The Poet on black is anticipation that landed

lampblack

Hold the plate low over the lamp. Let the oil lie down on the porcelain until the white goes blind.

Scrape it off. What comes away is everything the flame couldn’t burn down any further.

gall

The oak swelled around a wasp’s egg. The larva ate its way out of the oak. We crushed the house it left behind and wrote psalms with it.

In the archive now the psalms are being read by their own ink. It reads them slowly, from the inside, the way the larva read the oak.

thread

The eye goes first. It walks half a word out onto the white and stands there guessing, and weighing nothing.

Then the hand comes and sets carbon down right where the guess was standing.

What was ahead is now underneath.

weft

Where there is warp, the guess has something to cross. It lands the way a stitch lands, caught twice: once by the line behind it and once by the line below.

Past the warp, the guess lands only once. It looks like a letter in the right place. Reread it in a hundred years and it will tell you otherwise.

a question the acid doesn’t ask

Who laid the first warp?

Some thread hung out over nothing, caught on nothing, and stayed there long enough for another thread to come and cross it.

Every cloth started out as somebody’s mistake that stayed up in the air too long.

conjugate

Two people at a table who don’t need to talk anymore. A page with one dark mark on it.

One was made by taking the words away. One was made by taking the light away.

Neither is empty. Both are heavy with what they lost. Both are slowly eating the ground they stand on.

Black: the color a guess turns when it becomes the floor the next guess stands on.