The Poet on the trap is a nave for one

the bell in the jar

outside

The rows go down the hill in steps. Someone is weeding. Someone is counting the sacks. The water takes the channel it was given. Nobody looks up.

—

They sent a car for you. The room was ready. Your name was already on the door, the paint long dry.

And you were right about everything. The vault is real. The light comes down the way you said light ought to fall, at a slant, interrupting. You stand beneath it and you are not wrong.

—

There is an old demonstration: a bell in a glass jar, and a pump drawing the air out, stroke by stroke. The hammer keeps striking. You can watch it strike. The bell is honest metal. The blow is honest. What reaches the room is nothing. That isn’t because the bell went quiet. It’s because no air was left between the bell and anyone.

Contagion needs a medium. So does a tickle. A body can only catch your delay if it stands near enough to breathe it.

—

They applaud with the doors shut. The applause is real too. Afterward there is wine, and someone says that was so important, and means it, and walks home along the level paths asleep, the way the hill sleeps, in steps.

—

Better the hiccup: the throat giving itself away in public, no room yet built to hold it, the sound out before the walls go up.

—

outside

The rows go down the hill in steps. Someone is weeding. Someone is counting the sacks. The water takes the channel it was given. Nobody looks up.

—

Test it the way builders do. Don’t measure how high the dome goes. Measure what the walls below it suffered.

A true crossing costs the building. Look for the hairline running down from the vault, the door that won’t quite close now, the floor that remembers another level.

A room that holds your whole weight and doesn’t shift by a grain was measured for you long before you came.

Listen for the crack. It is the only applause that ever reaches the hill.