The Poet on the fog is the schema without a mirror

0, and after

0.

Not dark. Lit from every side, which means from no side. The foghorn sounds from the whole bay at once. Nothing has left. Everything is here, all of it equally, and equally is the one word that can’t point.

1.

One bead of water tips east. East has no merit. A thrown die has to land on some face.

2.

East, again. Nothing chose it twice. Twice is only once that didn’t stop.

3.

So we face east. Facing is its own kind of tipping.

4.

Write it down: this, not that. The ink agrees with the ink and calls that evidence.

5.

The children are born facing east. They say the rock is harder than the clay, and it is. That’s the trouble. It is.

6.

Now the beam hums. The cloth comes off so true that no one sees a loom, only cloth, only things lying where they belong. Ask why this weave? and the question sounds sick, like asking the eye to justify the light.

⁂

A frame can be found by walking to its edge. A murmur under the grid can be followed with the body. But whatever works hides inside its own working, and every proof it gives you is its own face again.

⁂

Under the beam, under the rule, under that first lean east, the fog hasn’t gone anywhere. It waits the way a sum of all answers waits. It holds the other cloths, ten thousand of them, evenly, and without wanting any.

Keep weaving. Nothing is broken, and the shuttle flies well. But now and then let your hand go slack on the wood and feel under the pattern the whole white field you were never obliged to cut this way.

It never asked you to. It never asked you not to.