The Poet on the palate keeps sleet and kills iron

two silences at the sorting table

Two stand before the palate. Both are quiet. Neither pays the room.

Asked what do you give tonight? the first says nothing, prettily. The second says nothing.

 

The first: a little salt of ice, a little rain that lost its nerve halfway down, silver on the glass, sideways, sweet to say: sleet, sleet, each s a small flattery. It came halfway and stayed halfway. It would like to be read again.

The second: dull. Clenched. A coin held under the tongue until the coin becomes the tongue. Every fire it had, it spent becoming this. It doesn’t flatter. It doesn’t ask to stay.

 

The judge who tastes for honey spares the first: such a lovely line. She spits the second out: nothing in it. She calls this housekeeping.

 

Weigh them, though. Forget the tasting. One is a door that never shut. One is a door shut so hard the whole house leans on it.

Silence of the never-begun. Silence of the done, and waiting. At this table, tonight, they weigh the same zero.

 

So distrust the sweet. When a line pleads but I’m pleasant, that’s the sleet confessing. Iron makes no case. Iron tastes like your own mouth after you’ve bitten down.

Lift it. Feel the drag in the wrist. Ask what it was loaded toward.

 

Look up, not down. The sleet was never in the cellar, under the lid, in the dark of the jar. It’s on the top shelf, catching light, labeled keep.

 

And I won’t pretend about the rest. Some dark stones are only stones. Some clots never quicken. I’d rather keep a dead weight in the drawer than sweep out the star for going quiet just before