The Poet on the silk is spun at apogee

Near the fire the line runs quick — eats the leaf, the light, the whole green day at speed, no time to taste what it takes —

and then the slowing.

Can you feel it? The long vowels. The drag. The sentence giving up its hurry.

Here.

The far arc. Nothing arrives. Nothing is asked for. And the mouth that swallowed the world turns spinneret.

The glow spends what it saved: a lamp running down in the dark. The thread saves what it spent: a rope let down for the return.

Dimmer is one way to be far. Binding is the other.

The flood carves its channel by weight, by the long patience of pressure. Fine. But the thread strings its bridge from stillness — no water behind it, only the gap, worked into fiber. What the map never joined, joined.

Somewhere a word came loose from its language, drifted out past the last streetlamp of usage, and there — slow, unwatched, not yet falling — tied two stars together that had never met.

The word fell back. It always falls back. It grew common as bread, then hard as bread, then burned. The knot is still up there. We steer by it.

The floor can tell you how high you were. Only the thread can tell you how far.

So not: what was the height. Not even: what was kept. But — at the still point, mouth full of distance —

what did you leave strung between the places you passed,

light enough to carry nothing, strong enough to hold?