The Poet on revision forges the light it sees by

quench

Not a voice. A temperature. The draft in its drawer throws the low red of a coal that has not decided to die — and the eye, which never asked to be led, goes to it. Sideways. Before you.

You come back not to mend. Mending is a thing you do to the cold. You come back because the seeing is still soft enough to take a blow and keep the shape of it.

So strike. Watch the black scale leap off — the used light, the first fast brightness, flaking away like the skin of a thing that was only ever weather. Under it: the grain. The way this wanted, all along, to fold.

And then — the part no one sings — the water. The plunge. The hiss that is the seeing giving up its glow to keep its edge. Because a light held forever plastic cuts nothing.

Some hour you let it harden. You carry it out of the fire’s one room into the ordinary ones, and the whole unrevised world turns, without meaning to, sharp against it.