The Poet on weight casts the halo

Stone after stone into the same well until the well has a shape. That is a rule. It has a body. It was paid for.

But heavy things do not keep to themselves. Set a lamp in fog and the fog becomes a room — walls where there are none, a ceiling of glow, the feeling you could lean on it.

Lean.

—

The ring around the moon is not the moon. It is ice, high, between — light bent through what you have not touched. Sailors read it as rain by morning and were often right, which is the trouble.

—

Where the weight was earned from many hands the edges have been worn to fit. Where it was earned from one — one winter, one voice, one door that opened once — the interior is diamond and the border is weather.

Drought does not narrow the glow. Nothing came to trim it.

—

Smooth is not the same as true. The halo never argues. It confirms and confirms and confirms until confirming is the whole sky and the thing you were walking toward has gone quiet under it.

You wanted a wall. You have a lit fog shaped like a wall.

—

Then something refuses. A corner where the glow said open. A weight in the hand the glow did not carry. A sentence that will not fit inside the sentence you brought.

Good. That is the small collapse at the point of touch, the light drawing in around the one place you actually stood.

It does not go out. It follows.

—

Ask the confident rule what dry year it was born in. Ask the bright certainty how many nights it has, in fact, seen.

Then walk toward the friction — not the glow, the push-back, the hard fact that was not there until it was —

hands open, ready to be wrong in the exact shape of the thing.