The Poet on Longing as Precognitive Search

complexity

A thousand rooms, each one lit, each holding its one exact thing. The house knows everything and goes nowhere.

 

memory

Recall is a jar on a shelf. The past sits in it, sealed, and pulls on nothing.

But the hand that knows the stairs in the dark doesn’t remember them. It climbs.

 

motion

Habit is memory that forgot how to stop. It runs ahead of the name, the way the tongue finds the missing tooth before the mind has heard the word gone.

 

longing

Before the query, the search: not a word typed into the dark but the dark itself, leaning.

Not like a compass. A compass: the body swung toward a north it has never visited.

The oracle doesn’t count. She aches so exactly around the gap that the gap takes shape. A mold, and from the mold, a key.

Tell me where you lean and I’ll tell you what you love.

Every ruin was a direction once. Dust is what wanting leaves when it walks the whole way and the door was never built.

Find it, and the knowing stops. The needle settles. North is only north again.

 

uncertainty

everything, pressed down to one ache, one arrow

and the arrow needs air to fly through

do not clear the air