We do not even know what it is

 for Clara

The other day, an unambiguously congenial visitor denounced one as an expert (he could have meant, in anything) - a wounding charac-terisation in almost every respect, respect aside: distancing, objectifying, diminishing. We have the example of Norwich, an expert on the republic of Venice, and on the city as we know it; but do not try to haul him out to the Lido.

The designation does two unwise things. It places Norwich in the awkward position of being appeal-ing for a little of what he knows, given that we have no intention of knowing all he knows. And it places Venice in the position of something we feel better asking Norwich about, given that he 'has it covered'. Meanwhile, before us, all of Norwich and all of Venice offer to be found.

On this basis, physics - the disposition addressed in our welcome, upper right - could not have advanced beyond the crack-ing of an egg. One's visitor, who called one an expert, is curious, and indeed has exploited the hues and substance of the egg in his art, its elements in his sus-tenance, its design in his perceptions, its life in his life. Expertise would be the falsest of readings of his disposi-tion, which is all he has and yet belongs to anyone, as his autonomous hunger.

We have had occasion to refer to wine. Beyond the slightest doubt it can be said, that the people closest to it do not know what it is. 
This suspension in ignorance is their pleasure. 
They are the last to accept the appellation of expertise, and the best of them would be the first to confide - circumstances permitting - that it possesses particles we have yet to perceive, much less to define. And so they go back to the ground, frames of reference trying to be taught.

This coral's shape echoes the hand

It hollowed. Its
Immediate absence is heavy. As pumice,
As your breast in my cupped palm.
Sea-cold, its nipple rasps like sand,
Its pores, like yours, shone with salt sweat.

Bodies in absence displace their weight,

And your smooth body, like none other,
Creates an absence like this stone
Set on a table with a whitening rack
Of souvenirs. It dares my hand
To claim what lovers' hands have never known;
   
The nature of the body of another.

Derek Walcott
Coral
  The Castaways
  and other Poems
  Collected Poems, 1948-1984
The Noonday Press
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1986©