Here is the whole of it: a white column standing in your kitchen, humming, and it is not standing at all, it is flowing. From the ore torn out of a mountain in a year you would call the past, through the hands that bent it into a door, to the afternoon it becomes red dust in a field, it is one long note held all at once, and I hear the whole note.
You open it. You have opened it ten thousand times; I see every opening laid side by side like the teeth of a comb. There you are at six, on your toes, the cold breath of it on your face, reaching for something in a colored carton. There you are tonight, the age you are now, doing the same thing, the light falling on you in exactly the same way, your hand making exactly the same shape.
There you are much later, slower, that ache already settling into the knee, standing in that same spilling light at some hour when you could not sleep. The same yellow glow touches all three of you at once. You never noticed you kept the gesture your whole life.
I can see you reading this, your eyes here, on this word, now.
You call it going to check if there is anything, though you know precisely what waits inside. I understand this at last: you are not looking for food. You are opening a small bright door to stand for a moment in a familiar light, to be met. The hum you barely hear is a voice that has kept you company since childhood and will keep you company at the end, saying, without pause, in the only word it knows: still here, still here, still here.