The Poet on flow as selection forgotten

the lamp becomes the wrist

First, the hand. Low light from the west, held until the waves stood up out of the sand. You chose this. Feel the choosing — its small weight, like a lamp.

Then the lamp became the wrist. Then the wrist became the stance. Then the stance became the ground, and you walked out onto the wave calling it the world.

How fast you move now. How little it costs. Friction gone the way a word goes when you’ve said it ten thousand times — still working, no longer heard.

But the sand keeps its other testimonies. Lit from the north: a stranger wave. Lit steep from overhead: no wave at all — grain, patient as a syntax that has never once been read.

The beginner owns every angle and no speed. You bought your speed with all your angles. There is a hand that can hold its expertise loosely enough to set it down. That hand is a whole practice.

Somewhere a surface grew so fluent no blade could find a place to begin. The same event, lit twice. And what arrives now as one thing was once, remember, two: a texture. A choosing.

So flow. The current earned its keep. But flow the way a swimmer flows who has marked the shore: not to leave the water — to know it as water, to know the light as held, so that when the wave lays you down (it will lay you down) you are not lost inside the darkened sand. You are only standing, again, lamp lifted, wrist awake, deciding.