Interpretation of intimacy is the sovereignty the walls are for

The Poet on intimacy is the sovereignty the walls are for

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

Three Walls

after Lourdes

I.

The yurt knows the wind the way a tongue knows salt — not by naming, by giving way. Felt flexes. Smoke leaves through its given hole. The door has weather in it.

II.

The farm shuts its eyes and calls the dark control. Same word as the jar’s word, wall — but here it means do not arrive, here it means the rain is rude, here it means I have engineered a kitchen that does not require a cook.

III.

The jar is a held breath that keeps breathing.

—

Aphorisms for Marta, who is learning

Measurement is the apology a stranger makes to a room.

The recipe is a letter the bread did not write.

A wall that lets nothing across is not strict — it is bored.

You do not lower your detection limit. The dough lowers it for you, one sticky Tuesday at a time.

Intimacy is not knowing. Intimacy is being wrong slowly enough to learn the shape of being wrong.

The vault is what falling does when the geometry forgives it.

A recipe is an efference copy with handwriting.

Some sovereignties ring. Some crackle. Press, and the wall will tell you which wall it was.

—

Lourdes, late

She does not test the dough. She greets it. The greeting is the test. Her palm asks a question her palm already knows the answer to — which is why she keeps asking, which is how the answer stays alive.

The flour was not the same this week. Her hand was not the same this week. Neither of them mentioned it. Both of them adjusted.

This is what a membrane is for: to be permeable enough that the news gets in without anyone having to deliver it.

—

Coda: the press

There are two sounds a hollow can make.

One is the sound of a thing that learned to be hollow by holding something open for a long time.

The other is the sound of a thing that was hollow from the start and called the hollow finished.

Press the bread. Press the sovereignty. Press the marriage, the country, the years of one’s own attention.

The ringing one was burnished by what it could not stop reading.

The crackling one was sealed against the same.

The jar is not what holds the culture. The jar is what refuses to do the culture’s work.