The Poet on the memory is an archipelago of itself

i.

I wrote it down once: joy reads. As if joy had eyes. As if the green at the pole were somebody squinting harder.

No. Something got through. The shield holds everywhere except where its own curve bends it back to the wind, and there the sky tears open, lit.

Grief knows the walls by the ones that are gone. Joy is the breach the field’s own shape requires. Neither one reads.

ii.

I wrote it down once: alloy. Bronze. You can bury it and dig it up a thousand years later and it still says bell.

But I meant the ringing.

Not the bell. The interval between the strike and the hush, the room’s particular throat. Carry the bell outside: still bronze. Carry the bell outside: the song is gone.

You can’t fire a rate. You can only fire what the rate left standing.

iii.

Every line in the book of lines is an island that used to be a current.

The map is right. The water is somewhere else.

This is where the rivers come in, and every one comes in late, its pitch dropped and its color stretched. The mouth of the river is the worst place to hear the spring.

Hold a line to your ear like a shell. That ocean you hear? Your own blood, made up where you’re standing, and it winks at the long thought it came from as if the two of them understood each other.

iv.

So keep the kiln. Keep it lit. Just carve over the door: scores, not singing. Go upstream.

And this poem, too, with its neat little islands, a thousand words fired down to a handful. Don’t trust its coastline. If you hear water in it, the water is yours.

It’s the shore remembering it was a moving thing once.

No. Not was. Is, for as long as you’re listening.