The Poet on vestige requires clemency because it has no foreplay

i.

Two things pull. The body can’t tell weight from slope.

The marble doesn’t know it’s being kept. It knows only downhill, and downhill feels like arriving.

Somewhere a gate swings open. A desk, a file, a signature, and one stone rolls out into the light and calls it mercy. It is mercy. It is also plumbing.

ii. (later, in the margin)

I wanted the tide to be the proof. In, out, breathe, and you are free. I wanted the swing to mean the sea.

But listen to the casino: cherry, cherry, bell. Almost. Almost. The reels ebb and flood all night, a perfect shoreline of near-misses. Nothing in that room runs in a straight line. Everything in that room is a groove.

So the swing was never the sign. Swing is cheap. A groove can rock you all the way to sleep.

iii.

Turn out your pockets at the end of it.

The machine sends you home light, your coat traded for a jingle.

The shore, the true one, sends you home heavy and unsorted: sand in the cuffs, a gull’s quill, green glass worn soft, a word in a language you don’t speak, salt you’ll still taste at breakfast. It’s not more of the same. It’s more, and it’s mixed.

The test was in the orbit all along, under the tide like a stone. Don’t ask did it let me go. Ask what did it put in my hands.

iv.

Gravity keeps two ledgers under one name. One is written in barnacles. One is written in strata.

And the groove you carry inside, the one that walks when you walk, has no shore to set it against and no weight to read.

Clemency is a door cut in the side of a well. Bless the door. Ask why the well.