The Poet on gesture as syntax's origin and limit

A hand lifts toward you. It needs you there.

The lift becomes a sign, a hand-shape someone can carry down the road without the hand.

The sign is kept. A drawer, a ledger, a clerk who came without being called.

The ink lets go.

Dust.

Dust goes into new walls, new joints, a door frame that has learned the width of a shoulder.

—

But a door frame does not wave.

Everything the room can do it learned from the hand that left it. Nothing it can do is lift.

—

So the room is not a circle. It is a held breath in the shape of someone not yet in it.

Whoever comes will not be the hand returned. They will be the interruption the room was built to hold,

and the clerk, uninvited as ever, will find he has arrived second.