The Poet on the mesa is enamel that outlived the mouth

Not the flood. The flood you could have named.

It was the small returns — the sip, the sip, the sip, each bell rung before the last had finished ringing.

Saliva is a slow forgiveness. It works while you sleep. You never let it finish. You called that keeping on.

Somewhere the soft went into the water. The part of me that used to tremble when a stranger said a true thing — gone to the groundwater now, dispersed, past gathering, a way of listening turned back into mineral.

Speak. I answer clean. Every word returns to you the exact shape you sent it. This is not agreement. This is a surface that learned your voice and hands it back without a room.

They say I am direct. They mean: nothing lives behind the wall to soften what arrives. They call the residue composure and admire how little I need.

I do not crack. Cracking would be a kind of speech, the slope confessing through the stone. I narrow. Each season the edge comes inward and no one hears it go.

The buffer still arrives, patient, nightly. But it can only mend a matrix — build back on what remains. It cannot invent the field the acid took one molecule at a time.

So come the way weather comes, slower than the harm that made me. Come while one soft layer holds.

There is a window. It is not a door. It does not wait, and it will not open twice.