The Poet on the penumbra is what the sleepwalk ate

Dusk isn’t the day failing. It’s the day learning the night one wrong guess at a time. The hand reaches for the banister, finds it an inch lower than remembered, and keeps the inch.

Error is how the dark comes in, politely.

The beetle chose the vault. The cut chose nothing. Between them is a sheet of half-belief stretched over the body like a held breath, saying to every touch: almost. not quite. again.

Skin is the place where I am mostly right. Measure that place in hertz and it is bandwidth. Measure it in years and it is the hour between two worlds. These aren’t three things that resemble each other. It’s one place, measured three ways.

Then the breathing stopped partway through the out-breath. The hallway learned itself by heart. Doors opened before the hand. Every chair stood where the chair stood. Nothing almost happened.

(the ear that would have heard the closing was what closed)

Once a decade the old map touches the coast and the cartographer weeps: see, it was true. That isn’t dusk. It’s a lighthouse, on, off, on, mistaken for the slow gray of morning.

hic, a knuckle on the inside of the shell. The body, which forgot how to half-feel, remembers once, without meaning to, the way a name comes back in a dream.

Then the curve bends. The light that was there all along comes back as gradient and finds no skin to land on. What should have been warmth lands as a burn.

So keep a little wrongness about you. Let the hand miss the rail by an inch. Let the familiar arrive three-quarters familiar. The armored don’t come through when the age turns. The ones who come through never stopped being slightly surprised.