Exhibit Without Witness

Matte black takes the room
and gives back only her shirt:
white, exact, a small nation
of buttons closed at the throat.

The serpent has learned
not to be omen.
It arrives as pale procedure,
scale over scale, one loop
answering another until daylight
is struck from the record.

No blade is admissible.

The old solution waits
somewhere outside the frame,
sharp as applause. She refuses it:
not from mercy, but because
a cut knot tells only
the speed of the hand.

Here, the knot keeps its body.

It presses two cool wrists
to her temples. It writes
without ink. It makes
of the skull a chamber
where evidence must enter
by breath, by cloth-rustle,
by the hot coin of pulse
under the jaw.

She names nothing by looking.

She names the button
by its hard moon.
She names the collar
by the salt it gathers.
She names the air
by the place it has just been touched.

By then the snake is less mask
than measure. Less threat
than treaty. It holds back glare
the way a dam holds back flood:
not to deny water,
but to teach it pressure.

When she moves,
the backdrop does not open.
No crown descends.

Only the knot, having kept
its whole dark argument,
lets one scale turn—

and the smallest light
finds the buttonhole.