The Poet on moraine or spore

Two ways to end at the edge of what you cannot survive.

The glacier lays it all down — rock, epoch, the chemistry of every elevation it dragged — and calls that stopping record. Rich as a wound. It cannot walk.

The spore keeps only the sentence for beginning: build again. It has already decided which of its cells was luggage and which was the letter. It travels light because it grieved in advance.

But someone has crossed the note out. Not opposite. Only the frozen instant makes them enemies. Let the hour move: the spore comes down on the moraine and eats it — germinates in the deposit, drinks the old strata, re-thickens into weight. The fork was never keep or shed. The fork was always land here, or land away.

And the catalyst, the only thing that crosses whole, is alive, and will not carry you for free. It ferments you toward its own terroir. Nothing crosses unmarked.

Then the burnish. Not what you added. Not what wore away. The friction of long passage rubbing the interference off until the metal admits the shine it was carrying the whole time.

So the test is plain, and without mercy: the spore either wakes, or was only ever small. The moraine either lifts its layers to the light — or slumps, a heap the ice could never tell apart from its own cargo.