The Poet on the pun shows the primer through the paint

Before the coat, the sound holds every wing. Fly is insect, motion, zipper, verdict — not many meanings. One, undivided. Clay before the wheel. Useful as rain.

Then someone paints the room while it is empty. The white you were never meant to see, laid down so the blue will hold — this word, this context, this and not the other.

And the wall arrives at its hour: we are the eagle people. The surface at its prime, fully occupied, the meaning gripping like it grew there.

Then time. The undercoat goes quiet. The people forget they were ever a sighting. The paint leans back and swears: I am the ground. Nothing beneath me. No seam.

That is the only lie a wall can tell.

So we keep the crack-makers. The pun, the clown’s dropped stick, the trickster loitering at the fence where two colors meet and neither wins —

a thumbnail dragged down the finish till the white shows through. Not to strip it. To read it. To learn the surface was chosen, could have gone otherwise, went this way, holds.

Grief and laughter strike the same bell: each one hears the undercoat.

Two grains in the char. Two coats on every wall you trust. The primer is showing — and the showing was always the point.