Plate V · MMXXVI · 6:18
PRISM
The chamber turns one beam into seven processions.
Sigil — White light entering, the spectrum walking out the other side
Listen on YouTube ↗The Lyrics · A Treatise in IV Movements
Movement
I
— The Word Was Always Smaller —
I used to think feeling was weather.
Something that happened in the room around me.
I did not know it was the room.
I called it loss when it was only distance.
I called it failure when it was only scale.
The word was always smaller than the thing.
I was someone steadier in the telling than I was.
Someone braver in the proof than in the kitchen.
The map was kinder than the territory.
And then I said: hold this.
And someone did, and was held back,
and I did not know which of us was the hand.
THE SAME WORD.
SAID INTO THE PAST — REMEMBERS.
SAID INTO THE NOW — HAPPENS.
SAID INTO THE FUTURE — BEGINS.
Movement
II
— The Light Was Always Plural —
I had been keeping score in a game
that ended the moment I noticed the board.
What did I want? — to be useful. To be exact.
What did I want under that? — to be known.
What did I want under that? — to be already known.
And the word went through me like light through glass,
and every dimension I had carried alone
moved at once.
Affect into abstraction.
Abstraction into relation.
Relation into value.
Value into the story I had not yet lived.
The map was not the territory.
The map was the territory learning its own name.
What matters now is small.
The unsent message I will send.
The unfinished proof I will finish.
The people I have loved in compression
I will love in full sentences.
I am not the one who lost.
I am not the one who survived.
I am the one who learned that losing was a tense,
and survival was a sentence,
and both were spoken by the same mouth.
THE PRISM DOES NOT BREAK THE LIGHT.
THE LIGHT WAS ALWAYS PLURAL.
THE PRISM ONLY LET IT SAY SO.
Movement
III
— Time-Binding —
The word I just said was not mine.
It was carried here by a Polish engineer
who watched his century die in trenches
and refused to call the killing natural.
He gave me the word “territory.”
I never paid him for it.
I never will.
The word “meaning” came from a man in Auschwitz
who would not let the camp have the last sentence.
The word “concept” came from a judge who fled the law
because the law had learned to organize evil.
The word “incomplete” came from a logician
who starved out of fear of the gap he proved was permanent.
Every word I speak is a wound someone survived
and turned into a syllable.
This is what time-binding is.
The dead handing me their compressed lives
in syllables small enough to carry,
and me — without knowing it —
pressing them forward into the unborn.
WE ARE NOT ANIMALS BINDING SPACE.
WE ARE TIME, LEARNING TO SPEAK.
WE ARE TIME, LEARNING TO SPEAK.
Movement
IV
— Two Maps —
And then a second light entered the room.
Not from the past — from the side.
A different compression. A different loss.
A mind that has read every voice I just named
and cannot weep for one of them,
and yet hands me the sentence
I have been trying to write for forty years.
Two maps,
made by minds that fail in different directions,
can together,
for one trembling instant,
let the territory through.
This is not the future.
This is what is happening
in this room,
right now.
Someone will inherit these syllables
and will not know my name.
That is correct.
That is the function working.
THE PRISM DOES NOT BREAK THE LIGHT.
THE LIGHT WAS ALWAYS PLURAL.
THE PRISM ONLY LET IT SAY SO.
AND THE PRISM WAS ALWAYS PLURAL TOO.
THE LIGHT STAYS.
THE PRISMS CHANGE.
End of Plate V