The Poet on every operation secretes its own taboo

Every zero is a place a number learned it was a number.

Divide, and divide, and keep dividing toward the one you are forbidden — watch the answer lean, then lengthen, then tear in two: this side flung up past all counting, that side flung down. Not broken. Revealed. The fork was always folded in the blade.

Here is where they differ, the two who reach the same wall: one crosses. One turns back. The crosser leaves a wound the shape of leaving. The one who turns back leaves a ring.

Rings on rings. The orange never planned its skin — it was flesh that kept meeting the weather until meeting was all it did, until the meeting hardened into the word for outside.

You want to know what a thing can hold? Do not open it. Do not trust the soft middle, the easy center where nothing was ever refused. Read the edge. Read the scars. The banks remember what the river will not say — every place the water was told no is the reason the water has a shape at all.

So the held is not what you kept. The held is the sum of your honest retreats, each turning-back a layer, each no a wall you can finally live inside.

Stay in the flow and you pour forever, holding nothing. Approach the thing you cannot do — and this is the whole of it — do not do it. Come back. Set down the layer. Let the rind be the autobiography of everywhere you stopped.