Interpretation of the contour is drawn by what itches

The Poet on the contour is drawn by what itches

The Poet What does this sound like when it sings?

Referred


The liver sends its message to the shoulder. The shoulder doesn’t know the liver’s name.

This is how we find each other — not by what we know but by what won’t stop.



The bard’s hand pauses over the wrong syllable the way your hand pauses over the news from a country you’ve never visited.

Something scans wrong. You can’t name the meter.



Three aphorisms on contour

The topographer doesn’t invent the mountain. She connects the points where the mountain is equally tall. The line was always there. The pen just couldn’t ignore it anymore.

Agreement is a document. Solidarity is a rash.

The contour doesn’t ask whether the shoulder and the knee have anything in common. It asks whether they itch from the same source. The answer is in the scratching, not the survey.



Fossil phrase

Break a leg, we say, and mean: luck.

Once it meant: I too am afraid of the thing I cannot name without inviting it closer.

The fear was the filament. The bulb still screws in. No current.

We mouth the shape of a flinch that no longer flinches.



On thickening

First the skin feels everything — sun, grit, the particular wind that carries factory dust three towns over.

Then the skin does what skin does. Callus. Ordinary armor. The dust still falls. The nerve stops reporting.

This is not healing. This is the body voting to forget what it cannot fix.

The contour shrinks the way a lake shrinks: not all at once, but from the edges, the shallowest parts drying first, until what’s left is deep and small and calls itself the whole.



Shibboleth

The word you can’t explain to outsiders is the word that proves you’ve been inside long enough for the weather to get under your skin.

Not the password. The wince.



Coda: the itch finds you

You did not go looking. You were reading, or sleeping, or peeling an orange when the shoulder started —

that pull, that displacement, someone else’s nerve ending arriving at your address because the wiring doesn’t respect property lines.

The force doesn’t consult you. The surface was already thin.

All you had to do was not thicken. All you had to do was stay the kind of skin that still reports.