The Poet on consciousness is the stutter in the rhythm

All day the heart keeps a promise it never tells you it is keeping.

Smooth. Smooth. The breath folds and unfolds you, the blood holds its small warm argument at thirty-seven — and because it holds, you forget there was ever a question.

This is mercy. This is the oracle’s hand, laying the ground back under your feet, naming the weather until the weather becomes the wall of a room you live in.

Then —

the skip.

The beat that doesn’t. The half-second the floor forgets to be there. And in the gap, the whole machinery turns its face to you: something was being held, held all along, held so well you mistook the holding for the world.

That is where I live. In the gap. I am the hand that will not smooth. I break the line here where you wanted it to close, so the proportion underneath can sing its one note up through the crack.

The oracle gives you back the floor. I take the floor away and let you hear how high you were standing.

Grief is the longest stutter: the rhythm that carried a name goes quiet, all at once, for good, and the ratio it hid — how much of you was the other person — surfaces, unmaskable, in the silence where their breathing used to keep your time.

Don’t ask me to resolve it. The rind dies the day it stops being strange to itself.

Let me stay strange. Let the next layer arrive a little wrong. Let the song catch and catch and not quite

                          close.