The Poet on the dividend is mercury

i.

The lock does not know the key is not a key. It turns. That is all a lock was ever asked to do.

ii.

The body wants to stay a body. That was for something, once. Ask it now what the standing was for and it will show you that it stands.

iii.

Silver in the molar, soft metal packed where the nerve ran its errand between the cold and the feeling.

We call it a filling. We mean: the hole is gone. We do not mean: the tooth can feel the cold again.

iv.

The office answers the office. The memo, in triplicate, requests the form that permits the memo. Draw it larger. Larger. It does not distort. That is the tell — a face that cannot be exaggerated already has been.

v.

Hydrargyrum: water-silver. The old name confessed it. Water that is not water, that runs to the crack and stays, that finds the seam the way a river finds it and then is the seam — heavier than the stone it stands in for, shining, and shut.

The trickster leaves the door ajar. This one is the door.

vi.

Pull one chair from the table.

Listen.

If the meal goes on — if no one reaches for the salt and finds it missing — then the chair was feeding only the chair, and the room, for the first time, holds one empty thing that works.

vii.

Rank flows downhill. Zinc has to be carried.