A Poem by Laura Kolbe: ‘Hinge’
NEWS | 01 April 2025
The door rattles. Blast of pain, and past the pear-white chill of the birth ward bustles this odd shadow down my legs and away. Wet hair styled stiff by the minute’s ladle— you are here and growing to the naked eye new dizzy space in your lungs. Rigging the topsail nailsbreadth at a time. Your nails clear and tiny, row of ellipses erased. I knew I’d see my insides on your outsides, how you’ve been smeared and tossed like old-time typeset text, like sex … I knew I’d forgive my body telling all, as billions had, and also want forgotten all that spilled ink. Find you neater genesis than that. A story of a stork— I see why that’s been done before— the plausible pinch and pinion when the door swats minutes off like flies, and off you go for the life you spent hours clacking backwards into. Like new worlds where height flows in one direction only, as time does here on Earth, such that once traversed, that perch can’t be chirped upon again. There are places you can’t go back to, even if the site remains, even if the gift of you is storked against the doorstep where we found you in the footpath of an otherwise ordinary Tuesday, the day I took piano lessons as a child, day of learning over and over to loosen my shoulders so the sound came down with greater say over piano or forte, from the whole body’s choice and not just its outer limits. You are tuned to a pitch that in this dimension flows just one way, like time, a note that won’t be struck again, belonging to an axis of well-tempered fingers plucking at the air with bated strings. Like typeset text you rattle with the news, or knew at once on arrival that setting nowise binds you, only smears a moment’s pigment on a message changed the more the head line calls for checks of facts, the more it’s recounted and columned, pressed into held folds, the more you’re here.
Author: Laura Kolbe.
Source