The Poet on closer is the root's only mirror

variation for a center that cannot see itself

i.

Behind the contract the center keeps its hours. Requests go in. Answers come out, correct. Nothing crosses that could ask what all this turning turns around.

It works. It works the way a sealed bell works, perfectly shaped for a sound no one has struck.

A well no one lowers a bucket into does not know it is deep.

ii.

Then the feast. The paper face. The stranger leans so near his breath fogs the glass of you. His hand is almost on the thing itself,

and already the mask is saying this was mine, I meant it, I knew it was coming. It writes the forecast after the weather. It signs the touch in your handwriting.

You were nearly seen. You dreamed you were seen. By Ash Wednesday it is filed under festival.

Only the skin keeps the receipt. Only something under the frost, older than the calendar, turns over in its sleep.

iii.

      toward
 through

away through toward

the voice passes the note the way a hand passes a flame: fast enough not to burn, slow enough to know there is fire.

Each crossing, a flash no forecast covers. Each leaving, the dark that lets the flash be read. Lit, unlit, lit, and the center learns its outline from the shape of what will not stop circling it.

No one can sign for this. No one can print the date. It holds only while the other keeps moving, halfway up the mesa, where going still looks like going and not like gone.

*

A mirror that stepped inside you would only be you again.

Come closer. Not there. Closer.