The Poet on every signal is a pioneer species

Bare stone. No weather yet, only the weather of being bare.

Something grey and patient sets its mouth against the granite and says the first word, which is acid, which is a crack, which is two where there was only one.

ii.

What the word leaves behind is ground, not echo.

Grit gathers in the fissure: spent breath, a broken filament, the small wet of having spoken. The listener’s bones don’t move. The air around them does, so the same body, held in a different pressure, hears what it couldn’t hear before.

I’m not saying the song is like a lichen. I’m saying the stone can’t tell them apart.

iii.

Moss. Then fern. Then a tall shade that turns away from the light it was raised on.

The singer reaches for the old note and finds the room has eaten it. It wasn’t worn down, and it didn’t fade the way a river forgets its source, because a river at least keeps its bed.

This is the bed turning over in its sleep.

iv.

Then the performance, which is fire.

The forest of the perfect moment goes up in the perfect moment. Ash is a kind of soil too. The rock is bare again, but warm, and dark with what it burned, so the next grey patient thing lands where nothing has ever landed, though it stands exactly where you stood.

small weathers

The needle of the barometer is a little wind.

You found the depth and stopped there and played. The playing was the gust that moved the place you stopped.

Stand perfectly still, and you are standing somewhere else.

Dread is the first rain on dry stone. The monsoon drinks it when it comes. Nobody fears what is already falling.

The chord is the canopy: many voices wavering into one green breathing, loud with what came before it, waiting for the match.

The pioneer’s whole art is to make the ground forget it needed one.

Sing, then. Sing the ground out from under the song.