The Poet on the covenant shifts before it breaks

Close your eyes in the sun. What you see is red.

Not because the sun went anywhere. Because the lid is a medium, the blood in the lid is the first distance, and whatever crosses a distance arrives lower than it left.

Even refusal receives. It just receives in red.

The hello arrives intact. It’s the silence after the hello that has traveled — the one that used to carry weight arriving stretched, and thin, and late.

The chart on the wall says where the star is. The star has not read the chart.

Two griefs.

One is blue: the color of here. The last light hot, unstretched, a hand withdrawn mid-touch.

One is red: the color of already. You dig for the layer where the frequency held and find more stretching under the stretching, strata without a floor.

The skin does not wait for a detector. It burns in the shape of what was uncovered, then peels in the shape of what was uncovered, and the mind, catching up, does not arrive at the sun. It arrives at the burn.

You did not lose it the day you saw. You saw it the day you stopped refusing to. The ruin was in transit for years — a letter sealed in one color, opened in another.

Stone refuses the light. Glass shatters in it. Bone takes it in, and lengthens.

So: turn the dial with the star. Not the whole sky at once — no one survives the whole sky at once — but a wavelength at a time, each narrow channel mourned as it quiets, so nothing pools behind the lid to arrive as flood.

Not the scar read again. The instrument turned.

What comes back around comes back a half-step down.

The promise is not the reading. The reading is what you keep. The promise is what keeps leaving, because leaving is what light does in a medium that widens.

Same source. Farther. Lower. Still emitting.