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HAMMER — *Pumps and a Bump* C20
*After a manner not entirely unlike the elder dramatists, though wandering willingly from sense.*
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What hand persuades the frost to counterfeit the rose?
What lantern teacheth midnight how to bloom?
I found a hammer sleeping in the ribs of silence,
Its face unlifted, yet the mountains rang.
No smith stood near.
No forge confessed the fire.
Only the patient dust,
Counting kingdoms by handfuls instead of years.
There entered then no king, nor fool, nor ghost,
But the remembrance of a staircase
Ascending downward into yesterday.
Each step was numbered with forgotten weather.
Each railing bent toward another season.
I climbed until descending seemed the wiser course.
Lo, there appeared a vessel made of echoes,
Whose sails were stitched from conversations
Never spoken, only expected.
The sea beneath was neither water nor sky,
But the hesitation between them.
"O pilgrim," cried the wind without a mouth,
"Measure not distance by the mile,
Nor sorrow by the tear,
For both are merchants dealing in appearances."
Then was I handed a shoe
Fashioned from clockwork and rain.
It fit no foot.
Therefore every foot desired it.
Thus begin all empires.
---
What bump disturbeth the tranquil floor?
Who hath misplaced the weight of gravity?
The planets answer only with tilted laughter,
Rolling their bright shoulders beneath eternity.
A pump was set beside the moon.
It drew no water.
It lifted absence.
Each stroke removed another certainty
Until certainty itself stood empty,
Wondering where it had been carried.
The crows debated geometry.
The rivers practiced architecture.
An apple remembered being an orchard.
Meanwhile every shadow sought employment
Under the feet of statues that refused to exist.
The hour became circular.
Tuesday borrowed Thursday's coat.
Morning apologized to dusk
For arriving in the wrong century.
---
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---
The parchment accepted these sober words
As willingly as it had accepted dreams.
No argument arose.
The stars made room.
Even the impossible hath neighbors.
Thereafter the stage forgot itself.
The audience became scenery.
The curtains listened.
The actors inherited the silence left behind by furniture.
One throne was occupied by a feather.
One kingdom by a question.
One crown by the memory of rain.
What monarch governeth uncertainty?
None.
Yet uncertainty collecteth taxes all the same.
---
HAMMER walked across the unwritten margin
Bearing neither sword nor sermon.
His pockets were heavy with unfinished metaphors.
One resembled a bridge.
Another resembled the idea of a bridge.
The third denied all resemblance whatsoever.
He greeted every stone by the wrong name.
The stones answered correctly.
There is kindness in geology.
There is patience in abandoned bells.
There is laughter sleeping beneath cracked marble
Awaiting only a misplaced footstep.
---
The moon unfolded like folded paper.
Within it rested another moon.
Within that moon another stage.
Upon that stage another HAMMER,
Writing this very poem,
Though each line diminished into mist
Before the ink remembered becoming ink.
His quill was fashioned from winter.
His parchment from forgotten afternoons.
His rhyme from accidents.
His meter from footsteps wandering through empty cathedrals.
---
Therefore conclude I nothing.
Conclusion is but a room
Whose door mistaketh every traveler
For the house itself.
Strike then the silent anvil.
Raise then the waterless pump.
Cherish the bump that interrupteth certainty.
For if the world be hammered long enough,
It ringeth not because it breaketh,
But because even stillness
Hath somewhere hidden within its breast
Edition of 1