It's Still Life

Liturgy for the Provisional Passport
(a hymn for the unmoored and ink-stamped, waiting)

I. The Arrival Without Welcome
The quay,
it tolerates you.
Coal-smoke and old salt.
A lamp hissing in the rain
an unwilling guard.
You step from the paddle-wheeler’s pitch
onto stone that has forgotten how to welcome.
This is not a border crossed,
but a threshold endured.

II. The Surrender of Self on Paper
Passports like birds,
taken by hands
that do not understand flight.
You give them up
as one gives breath to winter—
knowing it will hurt,
knowing it must be done.
Beside you,
black-coated defiance.
Foreign ink will not name him twice.
Some selves resist ledgers.

III. The Small Currency of Truth
Yes to the town.
No sponsor.
Nothing more.
Your voice,
the smallest coin you have left.
The clerk slides the passeport provisoire
across the wood:
blue,
fragile,
temporary as a borrowed lung.
You are not given papers.
You are lent existence —
on credit,
interest paid in silence.

IV. The Sound of a Door Closing Behind You
The stamp falls,
a small, final door.
The sea withdraws
into its own dark breath.
Paris is named now —
promise,
threat,
as a place where true names
might remember you,
or forget you entirely.

V. The Question That Hangs in the Lamp-Smoke
If the man at the desk asks for more than names,
who will step ashore
wearing what remains of you?
The answer lives
between foreigner and fugitive,
between provisional and person.
It is written in an unblinking gaze,
in the set of shoulders,
in the resolve that carried you this far
and has not yet learned how to fail.

VI. For Those Still Becoming
See the ink that permits passage.
See the rain that thins the past.
See the sea,
which keeps no records.
See fear, sharpening the senses.
See hope, refusing to loosen its grip.
See the provisional self—
paper-thin,
fierce—
stepping onto foreign ground
and beginning, again,
to remember.