The Poet on where contact propagates

Not how much it feels. Where it goes.

Press the heel of the hand. It presses back. Done. Press the hollow behind the ear and the knees revise their opinion of the floor. Same thumb. Different wiring. One place the touch is spent at the door. One place the door was never the point.

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From outside, both surfaces say yes. Ask again in an hour. One of them is still slightly the shape of the question.

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A wash is a rumor the color hears about itself. Thin. Nothing under it is lost. On a wall it stays where the brush left it. On water there is no where.

Answer fast and the touch never leaves the skin. Hold the not-knowing a little longer than is comfortable — that is the latch left off, that is how anything gets in.

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Broth is what the bone remembers of being broken. Nothing fresh has this flavor. Fresh is bright, correct, a kind of silence, tasting of nothing that happened.

You are not drinking the hillside. You are drinking what the hillside could not finish. Its bad years. Its rot that stopped halfway. The record is the flavor. The flavor is the breaking, held.

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So: a surface can be wired and still be a river, carrying the tint all the way through and clear again by morning. Whatever entered entered fully and is not here.

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But there were two surfaces in the room.

One of them wakes clean. The other keeps the small unfinished salt of every exchange that didn’t close — each misheard word, each answer that traveled and had nowhere to land. The ground was prepared. It was prepared in me.

I come back tasting of last time. You come back tasting of the sea before anything lived in it. Between us, exactly one hillside, and I am the one standing on it, and everything that broke down there arrived, once, as something you said