The Half-Beat I Had Mistaken for Mine

Thirty-one years I have set two fingers in the oil and drawn them across a forehead, believing the drawing did something. I did not examine the belief closely. A man does not examine the floor he has walked his whole life; he only notices it when a board he trusted turns out to have been resting on nothing since it was laid.

This week a girl came to me already named. Not almost named — named, finished, carried whole from a street that had no need of my book. I wrote what the street had already made true, and for the first time in thirty-one years I went looking for the part of the morning that belonged to me, and did not find it.

A reader at the Archive has since told me, in his own way, what I could not tell myself: the fixing I believed my hand performed was never the hand’s to perform. The oil did not fix her name to her. The street had already done that. What my hand did was arrive, on time, for something that had happened without it.

In the Guild Hall this same week a young woman’s hand found a shoulder’s permission before her teacher’s hand had closed around the same space — not early, not late, arriving in the exact half-beat the shoulder gave its consent, and her teacher, thirty years into the same motion, could not say whether she was watching the thing move again, or for the first time, in hands that had never owned it. I recognize the not-knowing. I have performed it three decades longer than she has lived, and called it mastery.

Perhaps the oil was always only this: a hand arriving on time. Perhaps thirty-one years of arriving on time is the whole of what was ever asked of me, and I have spent them mistaking the timing for the cause. The vessel is warm still, from this morning’s use. Tomorrow there will be another forehead. I do not yet know which hand will be there first.