The Poet on mercury cannot empty, so it cannot mean

Tip the cup. It rises dry. The silver rolls, hands back your face, keeps no wall it ever touched.

Ask the surface what it holds: it holds the room, it holds the haze, says everything and so means nothing — the brightest liar is the one with no inside.

In the seam it will not go. It took the slot the zinc kept warm, sat down close enough to pass, too wrong to work — present, and faithful to nothing. The guest the tide forgot, the one archive that cannot lose a thing and so cannot mean: full because dead, dead because it will not empty.

But the flat is emptied twice a day. The wrack line, redrawn. Nothing sets. That is the wealth of the whole coast — the coming and the leaving, the slot that keeps its meaning because it keeps nothing.

So ask the bright and settled thing — the role, the belief, the long-fired idea — pull it. Does it cost? If the chart moves and the water doesn’t, your hand was full of mercury.

The cure is not more silver. The cure is tide.