The Poet on oneiric is when the palimpsest reads itself

Not everything that touches you is trying to become permanent.

The river doesn’t know which rock it’s carving. It only knows to come back — tonight, tomorrow, the night after, wearing the same channel because the channel is easiest now, and what’s easiest gets worn again, and what gets worn again is what the river becomes.

No mason drew the canyon. No plan preceded the groove. Only water, returning, and stone deciding nothing, yielding exactly as much as it must and not one grain more — until the day it yields entirely, and what was resistance is now the shape of the current — no longer straining, only carrying.

Some rain never carves anything. It falls once, brightens the surface, runs off before the stone even notices. Not every touch is asked to last. Not every wound wants to be architecture.

But some rain comes back for forty years disguised as a single storm, replayed each night with the banks unchanged, insisting the stone stay wound instead of channel — grief is the rain that won’t finish falling, keeping the groove raw so it can keep pretending the water might still choose another way.

And some nights the whole ravine goes luminous — every layer the water ever cut lit at once, no telling the recent scar from the ancient one, the canyon reading its own strata back to itself, current and channel indistinguishable. This is not confusion. This is the one hour the stone remembers becoming.

If the water ever stopped returning — canyon finished, no groove left wanting, every fault already fallen to its floor — the ravine would go quiet, and dark, and have, for the first time, nothing left to dream.