The Poet on terroir at the crossing

lintel, in pidgin

Not the door. The stone above the door. Rough, unlovely, doing nothing but refusing to fall.

Ask it to be beautiful and the opening narrows. Ask it to carry everything and it carries nothing — the wall comes down on the threshold where you were standing.

Under-stand. To stand beneath. Whatever you know, you know with a weight above your head you have stopped looking at.

—

Too thin: a hinge. no wall. wind.

Too dense: the whole quarry lowered onto the frame, the source arriving entire with its rivers and its weather and its dead, its iron clay, its particular way of failing, until the door is not a door but a road into a country you never meant to enter, and the room you were building — small window, one chair, the room you meant to think in — is gone, is quarry, is somewhere underneath.

Right: enough soil to taste. Not enough to bury.

—

The wine tastes like wine. That is the problem.

Somewhere a valley is speaking through your mouth and you are calling it your opinion.

—

Keep it foreign a little longer. Let the word stumble. Let the seams show. Let it still smell of the harbor where it was built from two ships’ worth of borrowed nouns by people who agreed on almost nothing and needed to move salt.

A creole has children. They will never know the crossing. They will be fluent — and fluency is the amnesia that arrives dressed as grace.

—

When your hand closes on a thought, feel for the hand.

It is still in there. Still grasping. The fingers of some old animal curled around what you believe, and the grip has a shape, and the shape came from somewhere, and the somewhere is still running.

—

You were on the far bank before your foot got wet. The answer came wearing the question’s coat.

That is the moment to look up at the stone.