The Poet on the margin is not the object but the instrument

The callus does not only stop the hand from being felt. It stops the hand from feeling. Grip a thing long enough and the palm forgets how to read Braille.

So don’t walk to the edge to carry back whatever the edge was keeping alive. Carry nothing home. Stand there. Turn around.

Read the center the way a fingertip reads the dark — the way the wrist knows the cold a breath before the palm admits it.

A footnote is not a smaller room. It is a window cut low in the wall, set exactly where the builder grew tired of holding up the ceiling. Count the windows. That is the load. That is where the argument leaned.

Tap the glaze. Don’t argue with the surface. The seal defends the face it named and never thought to name the ringing. Answer from the ring.

Two words in this seed I will not say. Not withheld — held open. Say them, and they harden into meaning. Leave them, and they go on

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listening.