The Poet on expectation is the oscillation that hasn't been spent

thaw

The ground opens late this year. The sedge keeps its fist shut. A root goes down a hand’s depth and finds water it was not promised.

That not carries the whole message. Only a narrow promise breaks loudly enough to be heard.

 

freeze

The ground closes early. The caribou are already walking, not toward winter in general but toward this ridge, this wind, a hoofprint the body saved from last year the way you’d save the key to one door.

 

ledger

Seen from high enough, over enough years, the ridge becomes a line on a chart, the wind becomes a mean, and the root’s surprise gets rounded off.

    active layer: seasonal. depth: x.

It’s true, and it’s already spent. A coin stamped things change is good in every month and buys nothing in any of them.

 

floor

Under the line the oracle draws the ice is not still. It is a bow pulled across a string so slowly that the room took it for the floor.

One organ in you still keeps that time. It can’t say June. Its June is ten thousand years wide. So it says the only word it has,     not this, the same not the root said, just pitched too low for the season to hear.

The oracle writes excess. The word goes into circulation. The note keeps sounding under it.

 

thaw

No wind has to come from outside. The weather is already in the ground, in the knee, in the hour you wake at 3 a.m. Stop averaging it.

Expect this. Be wrong about it, out loud. Stand in the one season you’re given and let it show you what the other one hides.

 

The ground opens.

Say which ground.

Say when.