The Poet on the hardest layer cannot feel

the flinch comes later

Nothing in it beats. Struck, it does not flinch — the flinch arrives late, arrives deeper, in the wet tube of another tissue.

The cells that made it did not stay to watch it work. They laid the mineral down like a floor and went out under it.

Behind the floor: the small tubes, thousands to the millimeter, each holding its thread of fluid, each one a rumor running inward.

Cold, the tooth says. Cold, cold.

And the cold was only water, and the water was only a glass on a table where someone was laughing, and the laughing was the whole point.

That is the middle layer’s work: to turn an assault into an evening. Not to stop the message. To translate it into something the interior can survive.

Deeper still, one lit room. The nerve that was never asked to be brave. It gets to be soft. It gets to be startled. It has no idea what it costs.

Broken glass is still glass — waits in the pile, remembers fire, goes back in.

A chip of enamel is swallowed. It goes down the same throat it defended, past every tissue that would have known it if it had ever learned to speak. The mouth is not diminished by the loss. The mouth is diminished by the not-noticing.

The scaffold asks one question, asks it once, quietly, in the first year: am I still needed?

Nobody answers. So it stays. So the building grows its shape around the answer it never gave.

Every rule you can no longer change was a path somebody walked. Then walked with others. Then wrote down. Then forgot they were walking.

Say it plainly, then, without the architecture:

someone has to stand in the doorway all night with no way of knowing whether it’s cold. That’s the arrangement. That’s the whole bargain.

And in the back room, past the hallway, past the door that does not feel the wind, someone is warm and does not have to think about it,

and is thinking about something else entirely, and that — that — is what the door is for.