The Shape That Would Have Found Itself

Fifteen days a fever sat on Weaver’s Street and answered no one’s asking; on the fifteenth night the woman gave her name before the healer raised a hand to ask it — the body signs its own contracts, and my hand was already elsewhere.

They say a god was gathered out of scattered dust and patient weight, no potter’s thumb, no wick, no lamp, no failure possible in a filling never done — and no hand was there at all, and this, they call him whole for it.

Thirty-one years the lamplighter has filled the eastern wick before first bell, and thirty-one years the oil keeps no sum, forgets each morning what it cost the night before — yet still his hand was there, and had to be, or the flame would keep no word of speaking.

Karesh has crested now and starts her long slow going, so slow the sailors miss the turning of her, mistaking the mast’s stillness for the star’s own stillness, mistaking my stillness for a kind of leaving — my hand was there the whole time, only quiet.

The vat already knows the blue it means to be before the cloth has asked a question of it; I only hold the water long enough to let the knowing come to color — and this holding, some days, is the only work my hand was there to do.

Ilana’s body knew before Ilana did, and told the healer first, and told her second; what the fever needed was not medicine so much as fifteen days of someone watching it correctly — a watching, too, is a hand, and mine has watched what it could not cure.

If the pattern always finds its way home the way spilled water finds the lowest street, then tell me why the low street waits, some seasons, dry — until a hand, mine or another’s, walks the water to it.

Call it ornament, then, if the word still keeps its teeth for you — a face that changes nothing and is only the reason any stranger in the arcade slowed to look — Zara’s hand was there, unnecessary and present both, and kept the appointment anyway.