The Poet on the catalyst does not return

Platinum

On the metal, hydrogen forgets how to be two. The bond opens like a hand, the work gets done, the surface closes — and the surface has no idea.

That is the whole trick: a floor that does not keep footprints. Chemistry alone can afford it.

The teacher

Twenty years at the same window, saying the same sentence into faces that keep replacing themselves.

She thinks she is the flint. She is the wick.

Count the wear: a certain patience gone, a certain way of laughing at the third row — spent, not stored. What walks home each evening is not what left.

And nothing in the domain of meaning returns.

struck, later — the rune returns. Cut into stone, its language dead, it hands you a resonance and keeps nothing. The wear goes to the reader. The mark stays cold. Only what has finished being spent can spend nothing.

Impasto

Look at the ridge of white lead throwing its own small shadow at four o’clock. That is refusal. That is the paint declining to be a window.

Every smoothing is a swallowing. Subsidy: the strokes agreeing to be floor. Spire: the floor agreeing to be finger. Point long enough and there is nothing left to point with.

Zenith

No outside. No ledge to lean from. The one who lit it, burning. The one who was lit, the light. Ask which is which and you have already started the insulation, laid the first cool word between them: catalyzed.

Cullet

Then the fiction gives — the small glass lie that you were only helping — and it goes the way glass goes, all at once, into a bright gravel of former window.

Sweep it. Melt it. Pour again. The new pane is not the old pane. It carries the old fire in its grain, stands in the same frame, and tells the same thing to the light:

I let you through. I was not changed.