The Sommelier

the sommelier doesnt drink to get intoxicated

tastes to understand the vineyard, the weighted

history of a specific slope in a specific year

when the rain arrived seventeen days late and the fear

and the sweetness lived inside the same skin, thats the vintage

thats the information the casual consumer misses at the binge

i been developing a palate since I could hold a pen

and feel the difference between whats made and whats been

manufactured for a market between the terroir true

and the technically correct but nobody actually grew

this from the ground up, I can taste the distance

between the handmade and the industrial insistence

of consistency but consistency without character

is just the absence of failure, thats not spectacular

thats safe and safety doesnt have a terroir

safety has no specific slope, no particular star

light in a particular harvest just the average

of a thousand unremarkable passages

through unremarkable seasons and you can taste it

on the palette, smooth, balanced, wasted

the sommelier reads the glass before the label

knows the vintage by the weight, the nose, the table

pf contents that the liquid writes on contact with the air

the sommelier reads the craft before its aware

of being read, knows the hand that made it

by the residue of how the hand displayed its

pressure, its uncertainty, its particular genius

the sommeliers the reader and the thesis

every bar Ive encountered left a finish on my palate

the tannins of the complicated, the fruit of the ballad

the mineral of the pure craft, the acid of the grime

the terroir of a borough in a very specific time

i can tell you who was sitting in what room at what hour

by the oxidation of the image, the residual flower

of an influence metabolized and sweated out and gone

except in the sediment the language built upon

the sommelier trains for years before pronouncing anything

because pronouncing without earning is just mumbling

with confidence and the craft rewards the patient taster

not the first impression the sustained encounter with the structure

rewards the one who comes back for the third sip

and the fourth the finish is where the real grip

of the thing reveals itself the aftertaste is the thesis

the first impression is just the preamble, the real piece is

what remains when the obvious has faded

when the fruit note that seduced you has vacated

the palate and the tannin structures what your left with

the skeleton of what it is stripped of its gift wrap

and I am a tannin structure emcee

i am what remains when the seduction leaves

the palate dry and asking for the architecture

of the actual and I am the lecture

underneath the entertainment both are real

but only one of them is what you feel

three hours later when your not in the room

thinking about it thats the sommeliers proof

theres a vintage I return to when I need to calibrate

an album cut from a year of particular weight

when the producer and the emcee were both testing

against something real and the compression

of that reality into the bar is audible

if your listening correctly, if your palates capable

of reading duress in the syllable and it is

once youve trained for it the sommeliers business

is exactly that reading the duress

the beauty, the confusion, the digress

ion from the plan in the finished work

reading the human in the art, the quirk

of consciousness that makes it specific

and specific is the sommeliers aesthetic