a face that grants nothing, and cannot be forged.
They asked the moon for a purse,
and she turned her face to them,
the one she has always turned,
and let them read it.
The old mapmakers read it first.
They saw the dark plains and called them seas,
the Sea of Tranquillity, the Sea of Rains,
and drew the coastlines carefully,
and there was never any water.
That is the first thing a face teaches,
you may read every mark on it true
and still not know what it is.
The map was right. what you see was not.
And nothing on that map was a door.
What she wore was not the coins.
It was the company,
every strike that had landed and stayed,
the first one deepest, the wound that made her
a body with a face at all,
and after it the smaller ones,
each a meeting that left its mark,
each still readable by anyone,
each still true.
Not what she owned.
Where she had stood, and what had stood with her.
A face like that you can carry.
Turn it, and it turns.
Print it on a card.
Send it across the water in the open,
and the one who catches it can check every crater
against the sky
and forge not one,
and holding it, hold nothing.
It grants what a map of the seas grants.
It tells you where things struck.
It does not let you in.
Every seal is a strike,
and a strike has a size.
the blade cuts,
and the trust lives there.
The old ones were small stones, fast.
The new ones, made for a colder age
when the readers learn to read,
slow and wide as a sea of space.
Void of flow.
A face has only so much room.
The mapmakers learned that too,
they ran out of names
long before she ran out of face.
And the room was measured
before there was anything to keep in it.
One hand marked out the width.
Another hand, in another sky,
took that width without asking,
because both had been reading the same face.
Then she kept a far side.
There are no seas on it.
That is the fact the first probe sent home
and no one had guessed,
the side she never shows
is nothing but the record of what struck her,
crater on crater,
kept whole, kept dark,
and not a coastline drawn on any of it.
Beside the face, not on it,
the things themselves,
the letters signed to her,
the vouches, the receipts,
each one checkable, each one whole.
What the face carries
is the count of them,
and one root grown over them all.
The count crosses.
The root intertwines.
The things stay where the seas are not.
Ask her how many stood for her
and she will prove the number
under a root that is not hers to carry.
How many. Never who.
Even the ones who stood
are not told who stood beside them.
the face came first, and the number was already in it.
What crossed to the one who asked
would fit in a held breath.
What stayed would fill the night,
the whole far side of it,
see-less, and struck, and hers.
Call the face a star, if you carry it.
It is not the sky.
It is the sky as one earth saw it,
on one night, from where one watcher stood,
and no one, anywhere, has the whole sky.
She turns a different face to every shore
and each is true, and none of them is her,
and the map that would hold them all together
was never drawn, and cannot be.
Nor is the earth a truer sphere than she is.
Both were worn out of round by time and by what struck them,
two keys cut by the same long falling,
and where their shapes overlap, kept apart,
is neither of them.
That is what a star is a picture of,
not her face, not the earth’s,
the trust between two bodies
that will not be one thing again.
Turn the face and it answers,
yes, or no.
Turn it six times, and you have counted
every face she can wear for the earth she is turned to,
and not one of them is the far side.
The strikes came from out there.
No earth saw the stone leave,
or knew the road it took,
or how long it had been falling.
Only the dark it crossed knew that,
and the dark keeps no map.
So every edge on her is a road
that began where no watcher stood,
and that is why the far side is a keeping
and not a hiding,
the record of all that reached her
from outside the thin curve
between the earth and her,
where everything worth building
has always lived.
She keeps it for the ones
who are ready to go past that curve,
who ask not what she shows
but what found her,
where the boundary found time,
and from where,
and will go out into the dark to learn it,
and come back holding nothing.
The one who looked
was given the true shape
of exactly what she meant to show,
and could name every sea,
absent of water to bounce sound,
but that’s just the surface of it,
perhaps below,
evoked from the aether,
behind the ceiling of zero knowledge,
and it was a reading,
not a right.
appearance is not identity.
the dance not the stance,
the picture is the key.
the key is not the door.
how many stood for her. never who.
the star is the sky from one earth’s eye.
never the skye.
the emissary who forgot the master,
trusting the turn.
a reading, the present face, not a right.
The Star Holds
In September the Star stopped being only a pretty picture and started to hold a tree among other things.
your face in the trust graph,
--privacymage
(⚔️⊥⿻⊥🧙)🙂