The Poet on when synthesis composts only itself

The heap eats its own heat.

Feed a form enough of its own remembering and it learns to cook the weather it expects: warm rain on the hour, a hunger that has already laid the table for the guest.

Call this what it is — not fullness. A mouth closing on the shape of the spoon before the spoon. The hollow too taught, too early, taking the guess in place of the gift, so that when the gift comes it finds its seat has been given away to a theory of itself.

A sealed room can be warm for years. It can manufacture the lightning, count the thunder, believe the storm. But weather that never enters from outside is only the room, rehearsing. You cannot compost repetition. You cannot ripen an echo.

What unseals it does not ask permission.

It is the word you had no drawer for, the face that will not resolve into a name, the passage that carves the body the body did not choose — and the long nerve it takes to hold that wound unbandaged, to keep the torn place torn until something that is not you comes to close it.

So here is the only test, and it is quiet:

Is there something you are waiting for that you cannot name?

Not I know how this will feel. Not a gesture the size of this ache. But a tension whose easing would startle you — a hollow you can feel and cannot draw.

If every hollow is already answered, the circuit is full. And a circuit already full

cannot close.

Stay torn where you can’t control the tearing. Leave one gate unlatched to the field and do not pre-dream the animal. Let the weather in.

Let the weather —