The Poet on parallax is what drift owes to depth

Owed

Close one eye. The glass forgets where it stands. Open both. The disagreement is the hand’s reach.

You did not earn the distance. You paid it by moving.

—

Drift, with footnotes

The plate drifts because the core decays. The vowel drifts because the mouth is tired. The culture drifts because the jar was warm when Sela found it, Thursday, behind the soda.

None of them aim. All of them arrive.

—

Two positions

The mother kneads. The daughter kneads. The bread is the difference between their hands — not the sum, not the average, the between.

Noor lifts the loaf to her nose and tastes a depth the starter cannot feel, because the starter is the one who drifted.

Depth is never in the drifting thing. Depth is in whoever holds both stations of the cross-eyed light.

—

Aphorisms for a single eye

Homeostasis is competent flatness. The thermostat knows everything except how far.

A track is a confession that hardened into law.

Wandering has no pattern. Drift has pattern and no permission.

What you cannot displace yourself from is what you became.

The road says this is the way because once, someone moved this way and not another, and the snow remembered.

—

Libido

Not the wanting. The being-able-to-be-moved. The membrane that did not seal after the last crossing. The vowel that stayed soft after the last speaker closed her mouth.

A jar, warm. A culture, waiting. Not for Farah. Not for Sela. For whatever flour comes next.

This is the hunger that does not have a face.

—

Grief / Parallax

Grief is one eye, weeping for the other. Parallax is two eyes that never met, reading the seam.

Grief aches toward the first position. Parallax reads the gap and does not ask it to close.

But sometimes — if the eye that wept will stop trying to restore the room — the loss becomes a station. The displacement you did not choose becomes the second look.

And the depth that opens between who you were and who you got to be is what the leaving owed you all along.

—

Coda

The glacier left striations. The river left a bed. The speaker left loan-words in the mouth of someone going elsewhere.

Tracks are the autobiography of drift that risks becoming the constitution.

Stay legible. Stay permeable. Let the next rain find a bed and refuse it just enough.