The Poet on every clarity has a tint

Begin with the window that keeps its color.

Light comes through it blue and lands blue on the stone floor, and no one mistakes the blue for morning. Everyone knows: the glass did that. The glass confesses in the currency of light — it transmits and admits in the same breath.

The cleaned window forgets it is a window. Wipe the streak, wipe the dust, wipe the last small proof that something stood between your eye and the field — and the field arrives as if you grew it.

Nothing announced. Nothing to answer for. The most honest wall at least says no. This one says nothing, and you believe it.

Wonder is the smudge you haven’t wiped yet. The morning where you still say through. Through what — you could almost name it.

Lucidity comes later, the washed pane, the practiced glance, and the low voice under the seeing that says the blue was never in the field.

You keep walking the dream. You let the walls stay walls. You only learn what they are made of.

Every water tints the fish it carries. Every ear invents a narrower ocean. The chloroplast eats one ribbon of the sun and calls that ribbon day.

So the practice is not to break the glass — there is no looking without it — nor to swear the glass away, which is only a cleaner lie.

It is to read your own tint back out of the light. To hear, in every clean report, the second sentence beneath the first:

here is the world. here is what I did to the world.

Both true. Both yours. The clarity, and the color of the clarity, arriving as one held thing you learned to keep from closing.