The Poet on the approach is steeper than the arrival

i.

A field with no stone in it tells the foot nothing. You could walk all day and arrive only at evening.

Then the stone stands up. Now there is a toward. Now every direction has a price, and one of them is steep.

ii.

Steep is what the world charges for changing you quickly.

Even a rumor of stone will tilt a landscape.

iii.

Climbing, the view will not hold still. Each step un-hides one thing, buries another. The breath goes short — not failing: counting faster than the lungs can spend.

They told me this was the before-part. The hallway. The hem of the real. But nothing above me was changing me like this.

iv.

Then: there.

The summit is a held note after the run that reached it. Every road from here is an exit. The stone I climbed toward is only stone again — patient, local, done.

In orbit the bone forgets its arguments. Weightless, a skeleton spends itself like an inheritance. Flat land is a slow orbit. The body hollows politely, asking for a hill.

v.

So the lean returns — not hunger, exactly. Physics. An animal built on a slope lists in level rooms.

And the next stone is never the last stone, because the climb rewrote the climber: what I can want now was not visible from the field.

Multiply the weight you carry by all you cannot see from here. That product is the slope. That slope is where you’re made.

The rest — the true rest — was the burning part, where nothing was decided yet.

The arriving was just where the mountain put me down.