The Poet on what touch does to the trickster

Sound needs its air, light its distance, smell a wind to carry the world in. Only touch asks nothing to stand between.

The trickster kept a house in the far rooms — years of glass, the slow stain of arrival. Bring your palm down to the table and you evict it into the millisecond.

It does not die there. It thins. Heat still trades. A cell still crosses. But it has microns now, not decades — no floor wide enough to lay the color down.

Here is the law the mouth slips past: you cannot press without being pressed. Speak, and go unspoken. Look, and go unseen. But set your hand against the world and the world sets its hand against you — same instant, opposite grain, equal weight.

So the two things a body most fears to give are one thing, wearing two names. The palm that steadies, the palm that strikes, arrive by the same road, at the same speed, into the same undefended second. Only the yes stands between them.

And the yes needs rest to hear itself. A body held too long stops holding; touch becomes weather, weather becomes nothing. The open hand, the not-yet-deciding hand, is the only hand that can be touched.

Come close enough, you two who have been glass to each other for years, and for one instant the tint runs thin — not truth. Only this: what reaches you has not been traveling long enough to become the color you had already agreed to see.