The Poet on decay without constraint is heat

Sugar unmakes itself in tea and calls it travel. Nothing arrives. Everything ends equally where it was going.

Give it a wall. Now the sweetness has a preference, crowds one edge, presses, learns the shape of what refuses it.

⁂

The bank teaches the water where to go. The water teaches the bank what it is. Neither goes first.

Trade the terms and read it back — it is the same sentence. That is the whole test.

What was carried settles downstream, and downstream becomes a decision. The next water inherits an opinion. The bend leans. The lean is inherited. A canyon is a lean, inherited long enough.

⁂

Not water:

the trodden line across the lawn, which is worn by the walkers and chooses the walkers and deepens by being chosen —

the throat, which the song wears down, and which shapes the next song out of exactly that wearing.

Look for this, not for rivers. Resemblance is the cheapest thing an image sells you.

⁂

From inside the oxbow:

I have water. I have both banks. I have the precise shape of having been a river. Ask me about current and I will answer in the past tense and not hear the tense.

Nothing is missing here. That is the difficulty. The absence has no edge to catch on, no place where you could stand and say here, here is where it stopped happening.

⁂

Stone is not the river’s ending. Stone is the river, finished speaking, every pressure still legible in the grain.

The oxbow is a held breath that no longer knows it is holding.

⁂

Flow is the name for a bank you have stopped noticing.

Heat is what decay does when nothing is listening.

Every metaphor is an audit: count what survived the crossing.

The question was never what is going. The question is what is it going against — what wall, what grammar, what beloved obstruction turns the leaving into a direction

and takes, for its trouble, the exact wound of having routed it.