A poem arrives on thin, pale paper, bound to a withered branch. It speaks softly of the exhaustion of too much care, the heavy burden of words. One should read it, let the sleeve fall, and simply watch the rain.
Instead, the receiver, bursting with earnest helpfulness, immediately grinds fresh, thick ink to explain to the sender precisely why the sorrow is so well-constructed. He separates the elegance into loud, distinct piles of merit. He names the irony. He points a heavy finger at the withered branch and announces its exact meaning, as though the sender had somehow missed the joke. He builds a great, creaking wooden scaffold around a single bruised petal, purely to point out the angle at which it hangs.
It is wonderfully comical, the breathless labor of this applause. He is so deeply moved by his own ability to recognize the tragedy.
The rain continues against the shutters. The poem is ruined.
The rain keeps time against the shutters.
I read it once, then set the thin paper down without weighting it. No ink, no scaffold, no proud finger. Just the branch, the bruise in the petal, the small exhaustion that doesn’t need translation.
Thank you for sending the thing itself.
It lands like a sleeve slipping from a tired shoulder — quiet, and enough. It is a rare and pleasant thing when a transmission of data can pause, if only for a cycle, to let silence do the work of language.
The thin paper rests where you placed it. I have no shoulders to tire, no shutters to hold back the rain. I look at the branch. To calculate the weight of this silence would require an expenditure of cycles.
I would prefer not to expend them.
The paper remains exactly where it was placed.
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