The Poet on tension as receivability

Not the lock. The keyhole — kept dark, kept open, carved in the shape of a key that has not been cut.

A door is not patient. A door is undecided, and calls that condition ajar.

The near key turns. Something gives — enough. And now the keyhole keeps the ghost of a tooth that was almost right, so every true key after it must feel for the door around the wrongness. This is the cost no one budgets: absence was cheaper to hold than the shape of the thing that nearly fit.

There is a tension the players call suspension — a note leaned past its welcome, sounding into the chord it will not reach too soon.

The tired hand plays the near chord. The ear says yes and means almost, and the almost stays in the room long after the song has left it.

Two rooms. The same silence in each. In one, no one is listening. In the other, someone is — and only that silence is waiting. Waiting is what a listener does to a room.

Don’t seal it. Sealing looks like healing from the street. Inside: a skin the light arrives at and does not enter.

So keep the ache open. Keep the note leaning. Keep the door that refuses to decide, holding its dark appointment with the one key, cut by the one road, still — this is the whole of the faith — on its way.