The Poet on carnality is the fractal that sheds

How Long Is the Shore of the Lung

Seventy square meters, folded to fit two fists. Thirty-two, pleated into three meters of gut. The body counts the way a coastline counts: the finer the ruler, the longer the edge — and the edge runs long only where something must cross.

Fold where you meet. Branch where you take in. Everywhere else, be bone.

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Ask how long the shore of the lung is. The answer is another question: how small is what’s arriving? The molecule is the ruler. The surface is exactly as large as the least thing that can touch it.

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Ten thousand times the same fork, the same angle, the branch already known before it branches — the body builds a certainty this fine so that one molecule, landing, can be the only thing it didn’t expect.

Order is the hush. Contact is the sound.

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Every fifth day the gut has never met itself. The cell at the villus tip gets three days to be surprised, then lets go into the current and becomes part of what is passing through.

Synapse: hours. Lung: as asked. Skin: a gray weather on the sill, surface you were finished being.

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And where the fold was cut and healed flat — smooth, unbranched, no nerve returning — a scar. It cannot be tickled. A small architecture in the meat. Every body keeps some museum.

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Fold where you met. Shed where you folded. Grow where the shedding showed you something.

The coast keeps no record of the sea and is nothing but the record of the sea. Not memory — the shape that leaving made, the only kind of keeping flesh has agreed to.