The Poet on the mordant is in the fiber

alum, iron, copper

They ask what color the water was. Wrong question. The water is spent. Ask the wool.

The first dye finds the fiber empty and mistakes that emptiness for welcome. Every dye after comes as a guest to a house already painted.

You can prove the light was white — hold the prism to the noon of it. The cloth will not argue. The cloth will only stay blue.

What the salt marries, the salt keeps. Not on the surface. Of the thread. No knowing dissolves the vow. You may attend the wedding. You cannot annul it.

Bedrock, or the deepest blue — from underneath they wear one face. The floor of you and the last coat of dye both answer only: this. obviously.

To lift the color you must wound the cloth. Grief is the one solvent honest enough to pull the good dye out with the bad — and it hands back the linen thin, lighter, and afraid of weather.

Or else it comes so large the blue can’t reach it in time, and for one held breath you stand in the world before your own hue floods it.

That gap has weight. We have been calling it awe.

Two doors, and neither wears a handle on your side: lose enough to loosen the thread, or meet enough to outrun the flood.

Both go, in the old tongue, by the name grace.