The Poet on testimony is what emergence erases

Say it now. Say it wet.

The rain came from the left. Not the storm’s shape — the left, the particular left, the side of the one face turned into it. No one will find that in the clearing. The clearing keeps the shape and loses the cheek.

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A continent went under. What’s left stands up in pieces: this peak, that peak, each one holding its own weather, none of them able to say we were once one ground.

The water learned a smoother song. The water does not lie — it simply forgot there were valleys, the way a chord forgets the fingers.

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Listen: the soft layer is speaking before it becomes the pause. I am chalk. I am the sea that made me. I am here — and then the beat comes down, the hard thing, and the speaking is now the space between two hard things, which we agreed to call rhythm, which we agreed to call music, which is only the record of what wore away first.

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So the witness inside the wind does not wait for the wind to end. Waiting is the clearing’s advice, good for the shape, fatal to the pressure on the chest. The breath that couldn’t finish because the gust came mid-inhale — speak that. Speak it wrong. Speak it before the accurate morning arrives to correct you and, correcting, erases the whole education of being wrong from the inside.

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The peak is not known from above. The peak is made by the mouth that opens on it: I am here, this is happening, this is what I am inside of. No floor confirms it. No timbre ratifies. It has only the speaking — which is why it costs, which is why it interrupts, which is why it is the one true island in an ocean that remembers everything except the drowned.

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Do not stay for the clearing. The clearing is the ocean learning your name to say it without you in it. Testify. Go under singing. Be the peak that no channel can reach across — brief, committed, salt, and gone before the water finishes its beautiful, authorless account.