The landscape settles into its bones,

a posture of resigned anatomy.

A steady, almost imperceptible glow of light.

 

What remains is the architecture of absence—

contours carved by expectation,

a persistent waiting space.

 

Those sentinels stand in arrested plea,

their grammar written in bare angles,

a bone-white syntax against the sky.

 

The memory of rain is a different kind of thirst.

The soil remembers only the keeping,

the long nourishment of lack.

 

Even the transitory gives no alms,

offering only its passage—

a lesson in fleetingness.

 

In retrospect the strength was not

in the summoning, but in the steadfast

architecture of the empty hands.

 

It was in how a vessel

holds its hollow

and calls it a kind of keeping.