"That each protect the solitude of the other..." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke In the abacus of years, a bent vine, a jagged pearl: who strung it there? how did it calcify? Rubble scraped from the narrowest rooms whose walls thickened with nacre— don't we wait like them every year for spring, or long for a returning? It's almost startling: how soft the sheen born from wildness and bruise; how the throb of a nerve or a pulse cuts through silences beneath the skin.