The Poet on the basin caricatures

the lean

Set the marble anywhere on the slope. It already knows the way down. It was leaning before you let go: a hair’s width, a preference, a face turned slightly toward the window.

Every lap of the bowl the lean leans further. Nothing is taken away. The hand just keeps coming back to the nose because the hand loves the nose.

  jaw  brow  ear  mouth  nose
  jaw  brow  ear  mouth  nose nose
  jaw  brow  ear  mouth  nose nose nose
  jaw  brow  ear  mouth  nose nose nose nose nose

Now tell me which of these is the face.

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Leave it long enough and it turns to stone. The drawing is finished and the hand is gone. Nobody is left who could lean away.

Or the glass gives, and all that loudness comes down at once in pieces as big as the lean was deep.

⁂

Or neither of those. No hammer, just a moon. Not even a moon. A breath, a thumb held up against the glare.

Around the dark coin a thin fire you never saw because it was never dim enough to see:

  jaw   brow   ear   mouth   nose

each one its own size. This is the face the portrait was drawn from.

⁂

The bowl and the ring are one center facing two ways. What the slope gathers in, the halo gives back out. The halo isn’t the way out. It is the shape of the room, seen from the side the pull keeps turned away.

⁂

Then the brightness comes back. The bowl pulls again. The marble goes on circling its one idea.

But the eye keeps the afterimage, a green ring on the inside of the lid, and the next lap is a hair’s width less certain.

⁂

Keep a small moon in your pocket and hold it up often. You won’t get out of the bowl. You’re trying to learn its whole shape from the only place you can stand, which is inside it, blinking.