The Poet on when prediction models itself

Two Gates

The first gate is the easy one. You stand. You watch the road. Lit from the side, the ruts show themselves and you read them: cart, rain, nothing, nothing, a man with news.

Errors here are small and edible. Thought cart, was rain. Swallow it. Adjust the eye. Keep standing.

The second gate faces the first. Its only traffic is the watchman.

And the error at the second gate is I do not trust the eye — and the only instrument for testing an eye is the eye.

So the report comes back unreliable, and the report on the report comes back unreliable, and the corridor between the two gates fills with men, each one certain about exactly one thing.

Listen to the grammar of it. Every sentence hires the same subject and fires him in the same clause:

I will not manage this. I will not see it coming. I was wrong to believe the last thing I believed.

You cannot repair a language from inside a sentence that language wrote. The pen is the thing under suspicion. The pen is what you’d have to sign with.

Bring evidence if you like. It will be received, weighed, and then weighed again — not for its weight, but for the scale.

Here is the move, and it is not a better prediction. It is not a prediction at all.

Somebody walks out of the corridor and does not come back with a finding.

Wind in the grass. The gate unlatched. Rain arriving the way rain arrives, and the cold of it landing on a body that did not first check whether it would be able to feel this.

Nothing confirmed. Everything came in anyway.