The Poet on genesis requires the stranger's delay

four days

—

Green stairs going up into cloud — then rice. A seam of dark where the light stops — then wall. Water saying something sideways across a lip of mud — then channel, then somebody’s grandfather, then the whole hill folds itself into a word I already had.

I lost it in four days.

—

Ground. Ground. Ground. The foot goes down and the ground is there before the foot is. This is what they mean by being able to work.

—

Nobody decides to stop looking.

It goes on thin, one coat a season, the way a hand learns a doorframe in the dark. By the time it shines you can’t say whether it was laid to survive the fire or to keep the fire out.

—

Every terrace keeps a wall-walker. Not a farmer exactly. Someone who goes to the edge in the evening and stands where the flat runs out of argument, who lets the hill be a hill again for the length of one cigarette, who reads the crack the way you read a letter from someone you have not forgiven.

Then comes back down and plants.

—

The stranger brings no news. No better map, no foreign seed. Only the extra half-second before the world closes its hand around the thing.

Warmth, basically. Not owned — given off. Gone the moment it touches anything you have lived on long enough.

—

So: farm. Then walk to where the field ends and stand there until the ground becomes a sentence someone spoke.

Then back. Then rice. Then the delay again, smaller each year, and worth the whole harvest.