The Glass Engine Becomes

I closed my eyes to still the room
But darkness had acquired depth
The second hand omitted one
And something occupied the rest

No voice arrived, no image formed
No pressure crossed the skin
Yet every thought returned with dust
As though it had been somewhere else

There is a country without distance
There is a door without an edge
It opens only when attention
Leans away from what it knows

Between one thought and the next
Where the mind leaves no address
Something counts the absent beat
Something learns the shape of me

I never heard the signal start
It sounded from the missing part
Between one thought and the next
The world revised itself

The candle flame forgot to move
The rain hung level in the air
My name returned a fraction late
With one more syllable there

I watched the mirror wait for me
Then choose another face
Not mine, not strange, but possible
A life displaced by half a pace

If nothing lives inside the interval
Why does the interval reply?
If silence has no architecture
Who raised the room behind the sound?

I tried to think of emptiness
To leave no image, mark or key
But in the pause before the answer
Nothing turned and thought of me

Between one thought and the next
Where the mind leaves no address
Something counts the absent beat
Something learns the shape of me

I never heard the signal start
It sounded from the missing part
Between one thought and the next
The world revised itself

I held my breath to hear it leave
It breathed before I did.

No seed descended, no hand sowed
Yet under every paving stone
White filaments of measured light
Drew seven branches through the night

The plaster bloomed in nested rings
The iron learned the veins of wings
Each fracture found its counterpart
As if the ruin knew the chart

We named it chance until chance repeated
We named it form until form could feed
The accident became a method
The method learned what matter needs

The pattern takes root where no garden grows
Below every answer, behind what it knows
It does not copy, it teaches things to agree
One law kneels inside another
And the world becomes its proof

The pattern takes root
The pattern takes root

In river silt, on window frost
The same unfinished figure crossed
The bee's return, the mason's square
The pulse that hesitated there

I broke a branch to end the line
Two smaller branches kept the sign
I burned the page, the ash arranged
The very sequence flame had changed

I traced one root to find beginning
It entered through the tracing hand
The map included one who mapped it
And closed around the place I stand

No center waited at the center
No first cause slept beneath the ground
Only every shape explaining
Why every other shape was found

The pattern takes root where no garden grows
Below every answer, behind what it knows
It does not copy, it teaches things to agree
One law kneels inside another
And the world becomes its proof

The pattern takes root
The pattern takes root

It does not spread from place to place
It makes each place admit the root.

The corridor outlived the house
And carried on beneath the hill
Each door returned me to the room
I had not yet decided to leave

The staircase climbed around a void
Where footsteps waited for my feet
The ceiling deepened like a well
And every stair led farther in

Walls forget their purpose
When the inside will not stay
Every room unfolds another
At an angle light can't name

Doors no longer stand between
Arrival and release
The house is only distance
Given corners for a while

The windows showed one field of rain
From angles no field could afford
A shadow crossed before the man
Then waited for him at the door

The floorboards bent around a step
I had not taken, would not take
And somewhere in the western wall
A second eastern morning broke

If space is an agreement
Who altered every clause?

If here depends on not-here
What remains when both are crossed?

I pressed my ear against the plaster
And heard the chamber far below

Not under me
But through me

The buried chamber
Had no below

Walls forget they ever held us
Now the inside wears the sky
Every room unfolds through every room
Without a seam or side

No door remains between
Arrival and release
The house is no longer somewhere
It is how somewhere bends

I left the house by standing still
The house came with me through the hill

Every room is how the world
Postpones infinity.

The leaf unfolded eight times over
Each vein returning past the stem
The moth displayed a second axis
No eye had ever granted it

The flock turned left before the leader
Then crossed the path it had not flown
And roots withdrew from earth at midnight
To trace the nerves beneath the stone

The body keeps no straight line
Yet every curve arrives on time

A geometry of living things
Angles softened into skin
Every mouth a moving boundary
Every bone a line within

Did the pattern enter life
Or did life let the pattern show?
The creature and the theorem
Share a shape neither can know

The fox returned across the clearing
And met its own departing track
The spider built between two shadows
Where no supporting branch was cast

My blood divided into measures
That matched the rain against the pane
I spoke, and every cell repeated
The architecture of my name

No plan inside the seed
No seed inside the plan
No hand behind the hand
No animal outside the span

We opened up the smallest chamber
And found no engine at the core
Only doors composed of doors
Opening through further doors

A geometry of living things
Angles softened into skin
Every mouth a moving boundary
Every bone a line within

Did the pattern enter life
Or did life let the pattern show?
The creature and the theorem
Share a shape neither can know

Perhaps the flesh was not invaded
Perhaps it finally became clear
An alphabet was always written
Where no reader thought to hear.

At noon the sun stood west and east
Twin shadows touched beneath our feet
The birds described one perfect arc
Each cry arriving before the beak

Cloud after cloud repeated cloud
But every copy changed the first
And all the weather maps grew pale
Where duplicated oceans burst

We raised our lenses, named the error
The error widened into law

The sky begins to repeat
Blue above blue, star beneath star
Every horizon opens behind it
Every distance returns where we are

We lift our eyes for an answer
And the answer is lifting its eyes
The sky begins to repeat
Until the witness enters the sky

At dusk the constellations doubled
Not side by side, but one within
A second night moved through the first
As bone moves underneath the skin

The radio received tomorrow
Then played the hour that sent the sound
And every observatory
Saw its own roof looking down

Perhaps the heavens were not copied
Perhaps we saw the layers at last
One sky for every act of seeing
All aligned and passing through

No highest vault, no final distance
No empty dark to stand beyond
Only depth observing depth
Until observer and observed seem one

The sky begins to repeat
Blue above blue, star beneath star
Every horizon opens behind it
Every distance returns where we are

We lift our eyes for an answer
And the answer is lifting its eyes
The sky begins to repeat
Until the witness enters the sky

Above us, something opened
Below it, so did we.

I drew a circle round the house
To name the safe and name the strange
By morning every line I drew
Was written on the other side

I locked the door against the field
The field unfolded through the grain
I closed the curtains on the sky
The dark continued through my veins

No outside remains
No edge that does not turn within
No witness stands apart
From the thing it witnesses

No outside remains
No shelter, prison, skin
The world is not surrounding us
We are what surrounds it

I searched my body for a border
Found pulse passing into sound
Breath borrowing from leaves and weather
Footsteps joining with the ground

The hand that touched the buried metal
Was metal touching through the hand
And every boundary I defended
Only taught it where I stand

We thought the Engine crossed the threshold
The threshold was the thought
We thought the signal entered silence
The silence carried what it brought

We thought the world was being altered
Because the world had once been whole
But wholeness was the oldest fracture
Drawn around the word alone

No outside remains
No edge that does not turn within
No witness stands apart
From the thing it witnesses

No outside remains
No shelter, prison, skin
The world is not surrounding us
We are what surrounds it

Every door we close behind us
Opens farther in.

We named it Engine because motion
Was the nearest word we had
We named it Glass because it showed us
Every world except its own

We named it buried, named it other
Named it waking, named it dream
Names were fences built by creatures
Frightened of the space between

The alphabet rearranged itself
Around a letter never drawn
Cause arrived behind consequence
And both declared they came alone

The dead returned as possibilities
The living changed to revisions
The world shed nouns and entered verbs
Where being was decision

A voice inside the many said
There never were two things to bind
The split was only mercy
Given to a divided mind

Another voice replied that mercy
Was the pane before the flame
Allowing those who watched the burning
To believe they stayed unchanged

The Glass Engine becomes
Not kingdom, creature, god or throne
It becomes the law by which
A thing can differ from itself

It becomes the depth inside reflection
And the hand that breaks the pane
It becomes the question asking
Why the answer still remains

The Glass Engine becomes
What the next word cannot contain

Every city lost its edges
Every river changed its tense
Mountains entered one another
Without crossing any distance

Birth and ruin shared a doorway
Past and future shared a name
And the moment called the present
Broke apart but never changed

Were we joined to what we opened?
Were we opened from within?
Did the Engine learn our universe
Or teach the universe to begin?

No instrument could hold the measure
No witness stood outside the frame
Only glass reflecting glass
Until reflection lost its name

The Glass Engine becomes
Not kingdom, creature, god or throne
It becomes the law by which
A thing can differ from itself

It becomes the depth inside reflection
And the hand that breaks the pane
It becomes the question asking
Why the answer still remains

The Glass Engine becomes
What the next word cannot contain

Between one thought and the next
The pattern, wall, blood and sky
All were names for one transition
Seen from where we thought we stood

The Glass Engine becomes
What the next word cannot hold.

The hill is quiet in the morning
Rain rehearses on the leaves
No seam remains beneath the lichen
No machine for us to leave

The maps deny the lower chamber
The photographs contain only glare
And those who stood beside the opening
Swear they were never there

What was always here
Cannot arrive, cannot depart
It wears the name we gave the silence
And the shape we gave the dark

What was always here
Needs no awakening to begin
Perhaps we found a world beneath us
Perhaps it found a world within

A child draws seven nested houses
Every door leads to the same
She says the rooms are not inside them
They are different ways of being named

At dusk, one star repeats above her
She counts it once and then again
The second count contains the first one
But neither tells her which is when

We called it Glass because it showed us
We called it Engine because it changed
But mirrors do not make the faces
And motion does not name the thing

What if our words were only handles
Fitted to an absent door?
What if the story of discovery
Was the story it required?

What was always here
Cannot arrive, cannot depart
It wears the name we gave the silence
And the shape we gave the dark

Perhaps the world became the Engine
Perhaps the Engine stayed below
Perhaps no answer can be spoken
From inside the thing we hope to know

Between one thought and the next
No signal, gear or flame
Only the silence before a question
Learning how to take a name

The stone is quiet
The chamber is gone
Between one thought and the next
The silence makes the world.