The Poet on the spire and the caricature

A tower keeps a bell. A spire keeps nothing but the direction — the one word up, said thinner and thinner until the air is the one saying it. Legible from the far field. Unlivable at the last stone.

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The boardwalk artist takes four minutes. You laugh when you see it. Then you see who else is laughing. Then you see they were always looking there — that you had a good side, that a good side is a verb: forty years of turning three degrees off the light, a neck that learned it before you did.

Not a figure of speech. The same taper, run in flesh.

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What no one says at the table is what the table is set around. The salt goes past it. The plates orbit. The chairs know to the inch how far. Every guest could draw the shape of the thing no one has drawn.

The same taper, run in talk.

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The inner ear is a small sea that knows which way is down. Before the word edge, the sea tilts. That is all vertigo is: the body doing the arithmetic you declined for years, every not-there summed at once into a single height.

The pratfall proves the floor by hitting it. Vertigo is the proof without the landing.

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Two hands, for after. One points and says there — names the ice that left this valley, and the drowned place gets a chart. The other only draws, and leaves the room to decide what it has seen.

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But something does stand there. The swift, for a second. The vane, turned toward whatever is coming. The lightning, which goes only to the point — which the point was raised to take, so the house below could go on being a house.

And the steeplejack, roped to the last stone, who unwraps his lunch, and looks, and does not climb down, and does not name it, and looks, until the drop stops being a drop and starts to be the view.