Post No. 871

I begin with a line
that does not belong to me.

It has been waiting,
not for this moment,
but for any moment
that could bear it.

I write it down
and it changes nothing.

The room remains a room.
The light does not hesitate
at the edge of the table.

And yet something has shifted
in the way I can no longer
leave the line alone.

I try another.

It resists me
by agreeing too easily.

There is a language for this,
but it keeps arriving
after the fact,
like a name spoken
over something already gone.

I think of all the lines
I have written
and failed to keep,

how they remain,
somewhere I cannot reach,
waiting for a voice
that will recognize them
as their own.

This is not memory.
It is not invention.

It is the space
between what is said
and what insists on being said
without ever becoming it.

If it means anything,
it is only this:

that the poem is not the place
where language succeeds,

but where it leaves
just enough behind
to be mistaken
for truth.