Speaking of Doors
This entryway is not smooth,
nor gently carved.
It is a frame of burrs and tiny spears,
a froth of brown with a sharpened edge,
like the mind of a child who knows too much.
Its language is not for the sun.
It waits for the counterfeit sky,
the one daubed hastily with a stabbing hand,
a pattern of weak stars.
And it speaks of other portals, never crossed.
The echo of a hall where a woman stands,
her throat a raw gate,
and drinks from a cup of golden fire.
I know that taste.
It is the heat of a memory that will not clear,
the adornment of loss worn on a dress,
the wild things nodding at the edge of light.
They are all a kind of door:
this carved wood, that remembered pain,
the cheaply painted night,
each one leading to a room that never was.
A portal, they say,
should be of a certain proportion.
Not so grand as to suggest
an excess of ambition,
nor a cavernous mouth
gulping the light.
The preferred opening is moderate,
a gentle rise of land,
not a peak that scrapes the sky.
Allowing a whisper of draft,
not a roaring wind.
Speaking of doors,
I remember the seer in the dark room,
her soundless map revealing
a prophecy of colossal weight and wonder—
a mind that would crave vast narratives
through the thunder of ancient engines.
She showed me, coiled at the threshold,
the dark, intricate tether—
the first and tightest knot
before the crossing.