It is often a quote: dos

por dos and the framing, a toothless knife’s

edgework. Right, anterior to

the hand’s hilt, the heart as truer

organ, the preening happening any

moment behind the bush. You testify

to the blackletter flourish

of scripts. One can hear them bicker from

next door, from the afterlife of bevelled beams

and so many transcriptions of things.

I have come, not so much an announcement

as a dictation in parts: some wild hemming

to underline a bald expression that forgets

I am, I am, I am. Briefly, song is

werd for werd, then tree for forest, forest

for village. Information reads from end

to end—quasar, cave, cerebrum, and too much

light. To verify is to round

those Os as you scream into the last well

to dry up in your neck of the woods, clean

snap, the spine of tomes, the tombs’

synapses sending us this way, to go.

And why in the Islands, tonight, it is practically

tectonic. And so little time it takes.

The lesson of threes is to break

even the writing of fact, for

thee—moribund bard, herd gawker—we review

from the ground, letter by burnt letter, in situ.