The Poet on the frame vaults what the journey needs

edge markings

A rectangle agrees to hold still. Inside it, the harm, the debt, the duty and the neighbor in need are sorted and lit. You walk its aisles and come out taller. Nothing in the aisles moved. That was the gift.

Between exposures the film runs blind, a strip no shutter opened on. It isn’t empty. It’s unread. Here is the one they meant by someone is suffering: her name, the corner where it happened, the exact hour, and the way she turned her head.

Grind a morpho wing to get its blue and you get dust the color of a sidewalk. The rule is the ground wing. It travels. It keeps. It looks the same from every side, so you can carry it into any room, and it can never tell you who is in the room.

The frame did not do this out of fear. Some colors only live at the angle you stand at. The frame kept them by turning them away, a kindness that is also a lid.

No one built the old channel. The water stopped, and the mud remembered. Ask it who drew the banks and it says, I’m only the ground. You can walk that riverbed your whole life, learn every stone of it by heart, and it will not rain.

Rain is not the willingness to be wet. Rain is the water.

Close your eyes until the categories hush, until the loud treble of harm here, duty there thins to a hum, and underneath it one low note runs under both of them.

You don’t move through this. It moves through you, and the banks give way.

A new rectangle, kinder maybe, and hard-won. It lets her in now, her name and her hour. Look at its edges and see how dark they’ve gotten.

wind on