Interpretation of symmetry is what succession tells itself

The Poet on symmetry is what succession tells itself

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

one-way glass

I.

Not the window that swears it isn’t there. Not the wall, which has the decency to be a wall. The frosted pane — a lit shape moving behind it. Enough to say someone. Not enough to say who.

And the wanting is the blur: half of what you see is the glass, half is you, leaning in. You can’t tell, from the leaning, which half is which.

II.

Meadow: vetch, bluestem, the grasshopper sparrow’s dry buzz from a stem that bends under it. Heat off the ground at noon. Shade only at the edges, and in the shade something small and green the meadow calls grass, but patient.

III.

Forest: vetch, bluestem, the grasshopper sparrow photosynthesis, nutrient cycling, seasonal response. Shade everywhere. The small green thing is sixty feet of oak now and does not remember being called anything.

All of it true. Every axis chosen afterward, the way a widower chooses which photograph.

IV.

Symmetry is what the forest can bear to count.

There is no angle from which the oak is lit the way the meadow was. The light is not withheld. It is gone with the ground that held it.

V.

Ethics is not the alarm. Ethics is the hand flat on the frosted glass, noticing cold — not what’s on the other side, which you can’t have, but that there is a side. That there is a pane.

The clean crossing never feels the pane. Only the one stuck halfway, palm going numb, shape on the far side not resolving into shape, learns there was a between.

The moon that hangs too long across the sun is a bad moon. A ruined afternoon. The only afternoon you ever see the corona.

VI.

So keep the line you struck. Don’t tidy it. Let the reader put a hand where the glass was.