The Poet on the remedy re-primes at the scar

what the ground was told before the touch

Before the paint, the ground. Before the color could stay, someone laid the reason it would stay — gesso, thin as a rumor, deciding in advance which blues this wall will keep and which it will let fall.

You never see it. You see the blue. But the wall was asked a question before the blue arrived, and the wall had already answered.

Say the child is told: grief is a glacier. Then grief comes — the same grief that comes for everyone, the same dissolving — and what stays is patience, is slowness, is the vast thing moving under the ice. Heat knocks and is not let in.

Say the child is told: grief is a fire. Same grief. Same solute. Same arriving. Now what stays is the burning, the after-ash, the green that only follows burning. Patience knocks, and slides to the floor.

One grief. Two grounds. Two different keepings.

Then the kiln. What was a coat becomes the cup. The word you were handed hardens into the thing you are — no longer wiped, re-wet, begun. You were clay. You learn it only now, by the ring the fire left.

But look where you cracked. That rough mouth under the glaze never took the fire the way the rest of you did. It is the only part of you still asking the question. It is the only part still able to be told something new.

So the remedy does not read the scar like a diary. It does not go back for the lost thing. It kneels at the break, lays down fresh ground, turns to face the grief that hasn’t come — and decides, there, what you will be able to keep.

Your wounds are not where you were finished. They are the last places left unfinished — the one raw inch the fire forgot to close.