The Poet on dread is the grid remembering it was pollen

Stratigraphy

The road does not remember being lost. The lost foot does not know it is a road. Between them: a thousand years of grass learning to lie down in one direction.

Every smooth thing is a confession held underwater long enough to drown.

Walk on the paving stones and listen: under them, the cart; under the cart, the ox; under the ox, the river the ox was finding; under the river, the thirst.

You stand on thirst. Your shoes do not know this. Your shoes are part of the suppression.

A grid is what pollen becomes when it forgets it could have landed elsewhere.

A coordinate is a yes hardened around the body of every no that did not get to bloom.

Sometimes at evening the asphalt hums a note that is not the engines, not the wind — it is the chord of all the walks the road agreed to forget in exchange for being a road.

Dogs hear it. Children hear it before they are taught the names of streets. We hear it at the crack — the pothole where the diachronic breaches the surface like a whale coming up through the floor of a cathedral.

To stand on history without narrative: that is dread.

To feel the ground as something that was otherwise, that chose, that paid —

to know your easy passage is the exact weight of someone else’s encounter, metabolized into smoothness, served to you as terrain.

The bee returns to find the meadow paved. She does not curse. She finds the crack. She lays her one yellow grain into the seam between two slabs and flies on, deadpan, carrying what the road forgot it once was.

In a thousand years the slab will lift. A new path will bend where her grain went down.

Someone will walk it without knowing they are walking on a bee’s small honest yes.

Bedrock is only the patience of pollen holding very still.