Not Everything Hidden Is Hiding

I keep a face for ordinary weather:

coins for the bus, a list for the shop,

small talk like a key that fits every lock and opens exactly nothing.

Under that, a tide works the stones.

It moves without show, shifting the map.

My footsteps think they know.

You don’t see it. I barely do.

But it drags the anchors clean.

I have a voice for daylight rooms,

for names, for receipts, for ticking boxes.

Behind it, another voice waits,

unhurried as moss, that says

leave it, let it, listen.

Some truths wear coats so they won’t freeze to death.

Some truths go barefoot to feel which floorboards groan.

Both are mine. Both are honest in their way.

In mirrors, I practice the weather:

clear sky, light wind, no chance of storms.

But the glass records the clouds I don’t mention,

the bruise-colored, the almost-rain settling behind the eyes.

What I show you: a cup, unchipped.

What I carry: the hairline crack

running through the glaze, a fine river

that only shines when angled to light.

I drink carefully. That, too, is a choice.

The mask isn’t a lie so much as scaffolding.

It holds while something inside learns shape.

When the workers go home, I stay with the beams,

walk the planks in the hush,

promise not to look down.

There are rooms I lock from habit.

Not to keep you out, not really.

To give the shy creatures time

to step from the corners and blink.

They don’t like sudden light.

I have been both the costume and the bruise,

the glove and the ink that won’t wash out.

I have smiled like a gate with oiled hinges

and stayed shut anyway, because the field beyond was not ready.

Yet some evenings, the hedges breathe,

and the path I almost forgot remembers me.

A violet thought, blue as dusk,

lifts from the ditch and is not afraid.

I kneel without rehearsing how.

If you ask who I am, I will answer twice:

once with the map, once with the tide.

Hold them together and you’ll hear a third reply,

quiet as a cupboard door closing.

Sure as a hand finding its sleeve.

Not everything hidden is hiding.

Sometimes the surface is a kindness,

a lid over simmering water.

So the house can go on being a house

while the soup becomes itself.

I am learning to name the pot and the flame,

to let the mirror keep its half of the truth,

and to step out wearing only one face

when the weather is brave enough

to meet me as I am.