Does the Hand Mean It More

Lyrics

Found this just below the South Summit of Karjiang.
7200 meters.
Unclimbed since the Japanese tried in 1986.
Just a roll of xuan paper, tucked in a cairn.

They called you Keyboard Katie.
I can feel the cold of the duan inkstone in my fingers.
Pine-soot ink, ground at 4 a.m. in a tent.
The wolf-hair brush, frozen stiff between strokes.
Every character, a decision.
A body's heat against the ice.
Your whole life, your creed, written out here.
Where no one was meant to read it.

Does the hand mean it more?
When the ink freezes in the stone?
Does the muscle and the bone,
the deliberate, slow line,
say a truth the keys can't find?
Keyboard Katie, on a mountain of stone.
Does the hand mean it more?

I picture you in some unheated studio.
Winter mornings, your breath a cloud.
Practicing a single stroke for a thousand hours.
While the world typed faster and faster.
Messages in light, gone in a blink.
You chose paper that will last a thousand years.
And you brought it here.
To the last quiet place.

Does the hand mean it more?
When the ink freezes in the stone?
Does the muscle and the bone,
the deliberate, slow line,
say a truth the keys can't find?
Keyboard Katie, on a mountain of stone.
Does the hand mean it more?

What were you typing all day?
What code, what reports, what empty emails?
That you had to climb above the clouds
to prove your own hand was real.
To write a manifesto for one person.
For the wind.
For the ice.
For yourself.

The paper is so thin.
I can almost see the sky through it.
Your hand was here.
Does it mean more?
...does it mean more?