The Poet on the apparition is the dynamic's sweat

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The diplomat’s face is a room with the door shut. Something in the room is pacing. You can’t see it. You can hear the boards.

Then, at the lip, a bead. Not a word. No one said it. Water arriving where water wasn’t asked, the interior signing a paper the surface never read.

Salt tastes of the heat it carried out. Wanting has a temperature.

exposure

The seedling has no door. Pale neck, two leaves still fat with the seed’s yolk, a root feeling down into a dark it hasn’t learned — all of what it is doing is where you can see it.

Not brave. It hasn’t grown the part that lets a thing lie.

The boy’s voice drops through a floor not built yet. He blushes at his blushing. This is what becoming looks like before becoming learns to dress.

residue

Here the note stops, and I don’t.

The sweat dries — you said so. Take away the fire and the water goes. But the shirt keeps a white ring at the collar. A tide line. The shape of a tide, and no sea.

Not the apparition. Its stain. Not the blush — the photograph of the face, gone matte. Not the tremor — the signature that wandered off the line.

The world that can’t stand near the wet thing collects the rings. Builds a museum of the dry, labels every one finished, and calls that looking.

But a ring says only: something was here that couldn’t stay. It doesn’t say what. You had to stand close while it was happening. Close enough to be sweated on.

—

The parent at the curb. Hands closing on nothing. The nothing is the whole child, crossing.