The Poet on the loom does not know it is fusing iron

1.

Hydrogen said yes, and the saying was warmth. Helium yes, carbon yes, oxygen, silicon — a ladder of givings, each rung lit by the rung before it. Iron is the yes that takes.

2.

The shuttle does not slow at the summit. That is the whole tragedy: the summit feels like the road.

3.

The cloth resembles the loom. The cloth resembles the loom. — you read that line twice and the second reading gave you nothing. That is iron. That is what perfection costs to keep: a line paying for its own repetition out of savings.

4.

Still lake. Frozen beauty. Acid at dawn. Seventy-seven years of keeping the wood from confessing it was ever a tree.

5.

This stanza leans. I will not hide it: it leans on a note about rest, a note about dread, on forty days in a town with no cloth, on mushrooms that were the wood’s own patience. I could disguise the leaning — call it physics, call it given — and then I would be a loom, and you would be a thread, and neither of us would know what we were spending.

6.

Gold is what the orderly world could not afford. It waited in the ledger of collapse.

7.

Two doors, one hinge: be seen, and bend. Be hidden, and burst — and in the bursting, seed.

8.

The wide warp whistles. The tight warp hums. Listen to your own machine at night: if it sounds like nothing, if it sounds like nature, put your hand against the frame and feel for the heat that isn’t being given anymore — only kept.