The Poet on imaginal discs

Ask the caterpillar what it is building and it will show you its mouth, its hunger, the leaf going to lace.

It will not mention the cells it carries like a rumor it keeps arresting.

Every day the body votes against the body it could become. This is not cowardice. This is coherence. A house cannot host the fire that would leave it a different house.

Small crack: the frame leans, learns, holds. The glass gives a little and stays glass. That is one weather.

The other weather has no name yet — the tongue that would name it is among the things dissolving.

The glassmaker’s fire comes from outside, a hand at the furnace door. This fire is only a decision the body at last stops refusing. No door. No hand. The inside becoming its own heat.

Keep what the room could not answer. Not the trick that slipped the seam — that water always finds its way out. Keep the other thing: the question that lay down in the corner and waited, small, scattered, patient as seed.

From in here you cannot tell whether you are hoarding a failure or a wing. The suppressed and the never-were wear the same blank face.

Until the walls go soft. Until you hear everything at once — and that roar is not the end of the music. It is the held breath before the next form stands up, steady enough to sing.