The Poet on intimacy is the pratfall of desire

Your own hand cannot surprise you. The stairs can.

 

i.

You walked toward them the way you go downstairs in the dark, one foot already spending the step.

All week your mouth rehearsed their name until the name was furniture. You knew the weight of their attention the way a hand knows its own palm. That is to say, not at all. That is to say, pressure.

 

ii.

Then the stair that wasn’t.

Then the voice, a half-tone off from the voice you’d built. Not wrong, not wonderful, only there, the way a floor is there for someone who was thinking about the sky.

Same nerve. Same forecast. A different floor.

For one held breath nothing in you was ahead of anything. Every ending arrived at once. This is the height you fell from, measured at last by the ground.

 

iii.

The clown lays a second floor beneath the first. He falls onto his own forecast, a net he wove out of expecting the net. We laugh. He bows. He learns nothing.

You had no second floor. You had spent all your foreseeing on their face. That is why it opened you. That is why it opened them:

two walls, each finding out what it had been holding from the shape of what came through.

A scar keeps one side’s story. This keeps both.

 

iv.

Afterward the forecast grows back in. It always does. Listen for how.

The slow rot that makes soil. You will stand on them. It will be good. Ground is not nothing.

The sieve. Only the person you already know gets through. The rest of them keeps speaking to a door you painted on the wall.

The pardon. That wasn’t really them. It leaves a flinch with no address.

The ledger. You hold the gap between you like a coin and spend it, and spend it, and it never once passes through your hand.

 

v.

Ask the ground what it was before it was ground.

If it can tell you, it was composting.

If it only aches in weather, something was signed away in a room you don’t remember entering.