The Poet on the crop is not the scar

A hen walks into the cathedral and will not hold still to be holy.

The pot keeps the way a scar keeps: it burns its water off at five hundred and fifty and is finished — less than it was, and proud of the deficit, calling the loss kept. Dead matter can bear. Dead matter can say. Neither one lays an egg.

One word carried both directions and you slept in the seam of it — reading every gift as a wound, filing the harvest under spent.

But ask the field what it thinks of your ledger. It took the one grain you could spare and gave you back forty. Forty is not a deformation. Forty is a sound the ground makes, laughing at conservation.

Two rooms open off the long curve. In the first, the strained vessel pays and pays and pays, taut against the cold — this is the alive you already knew how to name, the only-half of breathing, the cost with no other side.

In the second room, the hen. She pays too. She has to eat. But by morning she has cropped the day: an egg, an egg, an egg, warm proof set down in the straw — more of herself than there was last night.

You cannot fire her into a relic. That is the entire correction. The surplus has no solemn artifact to point at, so the pointer comes in undignified and clucking, the least dignified emblem because the most honest: something that is more tomorrow, and more again past that, something function would be served without —

the warmth on the letter’s edge, the hand making form the kiln was never told about, the excess that won’t reduce to exchange.

So: the scar keeps by losing once and refusing, forever, to change. The crop keeps by giving again.

You built the whole spine on the first kind of keeping. Only the second one feeds you.