Rivers Through Stone

There is a weather-
not storm, not calm-
a slow-moving sky
drifting across my mind.

You appear there .
Not lost but circling
like a quiet scavenger
searching for scraps.

Your words like wounds
like flowers, like mirrors,
and something deeper-
a pattern, unfinished,
uncertain.

It moves
Beside you-
through currents,
not circling-
cutting through.

Forcing friction,
against stillness,
against stagnation.

You ascend.
You arrive.
You linger.
You leave.

You return.

You pull inward-
toward depth, toward sediment,
toward conflict
toward feeling.

Then you pull forward-
toward resolution, toward motion,
toward clean edges.

Towards the world.

But it does not resolve.
It does not reveal.
It does not spill.

It splits-
like ink across water
that cannot hold,
that cannot understand,
that cannot settle.

Not in despair,
but in a strange, dim light -
in gold that flickers
in the spaces between.

You feel it differently.

You let it spread,
follow its edges,
trace its quiet logic,
let it speak in fractures.

Let it be unfinished.

This matters.
This hurts.
This means something.

I meet it like resistance.
push against it,
try to change it,
into something passable,
that can be climbed over
or stepped past.

And yet-

there are moments
when we both give in.

Distance dissolves-
and we shift.
like rivers moving
not around stone,
but through it,
and with it.

And we listen
to the quiet breaths
between our breaths
that pattern our existence.