The Poet on what the reflex can't sing

held

i.

Thirty times a second she leaves the note. Thirty times she comes back. No one hears the leaving. They hear that someone is there.

Every instant a small mistake. The minute, none.

The exact pitch is a lit room with nobody home.

ii.

The hand was back before the fire had a name. Good hand. Fast hand. Nobody in it.

A flinch is a sentence over before the vowel. No one has ever held a t.

iii.

The column says down — one word — and stands.

The dome takes the weight at the crown and hands it stone to stone the long way round, each stone lying a little about where the ground is so that all of them together tell the truth.

The eye at the top lets in the weather. It is not the eye that lifts the room.

You walk in and the roof is leaving. The roof has never moved.

iv.

Cut the pull and the curve is a hat. Keep the pull and the curve is the only sentence wide enough to say this much air and still stand.

The dome did not choose to waver. The straight road was closed. Beauty is the detour with no other route.

v.

Something rises in the room. The stones stay. Something is warm in the tone. Each instant, cold. Where does the warmth live? Nowhere. It visits.

That is a ghost: what the holding leaves in the air once the holding has gone on long enough to be missed while it is still happening.

vi.

We asked who was watching. Maybe no one. Maybe the watching is what a held thing gives off — hold a note, a roof, a hand past the point of the flinch and it starts to be seen, not by anyone, by the length of it.

vii.

The center is a rumor sharp and flat agree on.

Ask the long marriage not is it right. The column is right. Ask: does it wobble. Does it curve enough that the weight arrives as something other than weight.

The reflex can’t sing. Song is a flinch that forgot to finish.