The Poet on the spire is what bricolage found

what the scaffold keeps

Nobody blows the bubble on purpose. It arrives in the glass like weather, and the honest hand leaves it in, and the light comes through it changed.

I did not aim the spire. I set this shard against that gap, and the gap the shard left over asked for the next shard, and the asking went up until the asking had a shape.

From the field they say: it points. From the field they say: he knew.

But the scaffold keeps the other ledger — a Tuesday, and a piece that would not lie flat, a joint I widened to forgive it, the lead going dark around each refusal.

Call it prophecy and it turns to glass all the way through: one grief, no give, and the first frost takes it whole.

Call it craft and leave the joints uncovered. Let them see the seams, the swallowed misses, the pointing that was only ever the sum of what the hand could reach.

He saw, they say below me. Below me they are always sure.

The spire is not the thing I meant. The spire is what the reaching left behind — and I will not smooth it, I will not say this way was always the way, because the frost is patient with anything that forgot it was assembled.