The Poet on the heuristic is barter that forgot who it was trading with

i.

Every coin was once a face. Someone was pressed into it — a nose, a chin, a year. Then the hands. Ten thousand hands, and the face goes the way a step goes in stone: not removed. Crossed over.

Hold the smooth thing up. It still weighs what it weighed. It still buys what it bought. Ask it who it was.

ii.

She stood at the crack and felt the tension as tension and her hand went this way. She stood at the crack and the tension and her hand went this way. At the crack, the hand went this way. The hand, this way. This way. This.

Now teach it.

iii.

Call it a pulse if you like. A leak has rhythm too. Drip, and a skin forms. Drip, and the skin has a skin. Every beat lays one more bright coat on the ground it came out of.

Forty days of tongue against seventy-seven years of hand. Do the sum. The tongue loses. Each spring the ground is a little less ground and a little more yield. Bright. Sealed. Deep as paint.

iv.

Then the hand stops. Not the practice — the hand. Maret is a name now. A name is the coin a face leaves.

And the room does not go dark.

Nobody lit it. Nothing in it remembers. The reflex is on the floor, unstrung. The face is nowhere. And the light stays, the way heat stays in a stone after the fire has stopped explaining itself.

Look what it falls on.

Not the thread. Not the season. The frame. The wood the thread was always answering to. The thing you were too fluent to see and too busy trading to ask.

v.

The loom can say how long. The loom can say which thread. The loom has never once said what color the air is when the work is done.

vi.

Don’t mint it. Don’t go looking for a face to trade with. Sit. The room knows something happened. It doesn’t know what. That is the one kind of knowing no hand can wear smooth.