A Stain Is Also a Signature

The guest forgot his coat and has come back for it, not troubling to knock — the river dropped its whisper to nothing the stones have stopped straining to hear.

On Mulov Street a woman turns a small shirt to the light the way I turn a bolt, and finds a grey band pressed into the weave that no ash, no vinegar, will lift.

She pins it anyway, mark and all, and calls that nothing. It is not nothing. It is the flood, keeping an appointment with a boy who will outgrow it first.

Indigo came in dry and cheap this morning, off a ship too slow to blame on wind — a blue that asks nothing of the hand that mixed it, and will not remember me.

Mine costs eleven months and a woman who counts them twice before she buys, and something in the counting is the actual thing I sell, not the color.

Two vats can stand identical to a stranger’s eye, one already knowing its blue, one only waiting — and no ledger anywhere records which hand made which.

The Archive keeps a shelf of things sealed for two different reasons that wear the same dust and answer to the same key, or to none at all.

No clerk opened that shirt’s hem to enter it. No jar was broken to prove the flood. The mark stayed anyway — unwarranted, unfiled, entirely and only itself.

I have spent nineteen years asking my blue to be believed. Tonight I think the shirt on the line believes nothing, needs nothing to. It only kept the water.