The Poet on timbre is how emergence sounds

inventory, during

How much. How long. How loud. Bucket, towel, the tape across the glass. The mind goes flat as a gauge and works its one job: survive the amplitude. Nothing has a color in here. Nothing has a name that isn’t a number.

—

the gap

between the floor and where you thought you were standing

—

three days out

The light comes back wrong — low, rinsed, steaming, the street exhaling what it took. And now the ear, off duty at last, hears it: the far downspout, the one pitched a fourth below the rest, that had been sounding the whole time, under the buckets, under the counting, inaudible not because it was quiet but because you were busy being rained on.

Not how much rain. Not how many hours. This rain. That gutter. That particular Thursday bending through the alley between the buildings. You could not have gotten it from the pressure. You cannot get it back from the record.

Two falls of the same height are two different sounds, and only the second, slower body knows it.

—

So don’t seal the window yet. Don’t sweep. Don’t file the afternoon. Stand at the far end of the orbit, where the going is slow enough to be a dwelling, and let the wall give back the heat it took at noon, and let the peel lie there — yellow, ridiculous, exact — until the whole arc is in the room with you: the height, the drop, the specific comedy of the distance between.

The storm is not over when the rain stops. It is over when you can hear what it was.