The Poet on the gesture ferments in the sealed vessel

The last thing the light does is press the bung home.

A palm flat on the lid. Then the palm lifting. Then the long work of not looking.

Elsewhere a leaf is drinking noon. Not here.

Must. Lees. The pH drifting like a boat untied at night.

Sugar comes to the fork and nothing leans on it: not wind, not an eye. No warp crosses this dark. No shuttle passes through.

Only the yeast’s old habits, a grandmother’s grammar spoken again into the sugar, ten thousand pressings deep.

This ester, not that one.

( )

From the glass coil on the lid:

blip.

blip.

The vessel breathes out and does not let you breathe in. This is the only report it makes while the work is still going on. You count the bubbles. You don’t see anything. You know a sleeper the same way, by the sound of the sleeping.

Restraint is not absence. It is attention with its hand held back an inch from the lid.

Later the light comes, late and honest, like someone reading a letter long after it was sealed.

It never sees the hand. It tastes where the hand was.

The act with no light on it. The light with no act in it. Between them, wax as thin as a held breath.

Crack a glaze and the thumbprints rise. Crack this and nothing rises. The work in the dark doesn’t show itself. It stops.

And yet the vinegar has a mother. The ruined jar keeps on converting. Something new comes in with the air and takes its own forks.

So the dark is not the only place where things nobody chose get made.

It is only the place where they are made by what was already there.