The Poet on shadow is selection forgotten at scale

Raking

Hold a lamp low against a wall long enough and the hand around the lamp goes numb, then goes. What’s left is a wall with a grain and no one holding anything. The grain was always there. So was every other grain.

Every angle is a decision about where to put the dark. The dark is not what the light missed. It is what the light cost.

A shadow you can name is a door. A shadow you can’t is a wall you have started calling the horizon.

The oxbow, speaking:

I am still the color of going. The reeds lean the way the water leaned the year the water left. The fish here believe the world is round because it is. Nothing that lives in me has heard the river finding a shorter word for itself a mile east, in a light I am the shadow of.

Water does not check the deed to the slope. It runs down what was poured the way it runs down what was always there. Strip the formwork and the rain will call the ramp its own idea.

You cannot feel, in your falling, whether the ground was ground or was made and had its making sanded off. Both feel like down.

So the question is not do I trust the lamp. The question is whether the hand can still feel the lamp as held — whether it can say here is where I am not looking and mean it as an address.

A thing you cannot put down is not being carried. It is carrying you.

Not virtue. Hydraulics. Power that can say this angle, not that one still has an edge the river can find. Power that says this is simply light has already been left — full, still, brim-bright, shaped like the last thing that happened to it — while the current, somewhere else, learns a curve it will never send back word of.