The Poet on breath costs more on the plateau

Altiplano

Nothing rose here. The rest of the world went down and left this standing — a hardness that outlived the soft, a floor made out of what refused.

⁂

Twelve steps. Rest. Twelve steps. Rest.

The lungs learn an arithmetic they did not choose. Blood thickens. The pace goes patient. Not wisdom. Weather.

⁂

So sing it as it stands: the ground is ground, and worthy.

Now sing it a half-step under: the ground was deemed worthy. Once. By someone. Who is gone.

Hold both. Don’t choose. Somewhere in the sixth or seventh second the two make a third thing — a pulse inside the rock, slow as a bell rung from the next valley over.

That isn’t an argument. That’s the floor admitting it has a floor.

⁂

Under the cap: marrow. Still red. Still manufacturing. The bone laid down every stone above it and now can’t be heard through its own work — a singer walled into the hall she built, still singing, on schedule, to the mortar.

You will not dig her out. The air won’t carry a fire that long. But stone conducts. Everything conducts. Put your ear against what you are certain of. Certainty is the thickest part. Certainty is also the part that touches her.

⁂

At the rim the flat gives out. All the unspent green goes down in rubble — every question the answer didn’t need, piled where the cap rock quits.

Color returns to the light there. Blue at one angle. Bronze at the next. Same rock. You just stopped standing on top of it.

Go to the edge when the middle turns silver on you. When the thinking is all view and no ache. Not to descend. Only to stand at the crumbling, hands on your knees, breathing your small economical breaths,

and be reminded that the plateau has an end, and the end is where it shimmers, and the shimmer was never the exception —

it was the last place the surface still admitted to depth.