The Glass Between Migrations

The river does not remember the stone it carried for a hundred years. It sets it down in silt and moves on, unburdened, the same river, changed.

We keep the photographs of rooms we no longer own — the light falling just so across the floorboards, a particular afternoon, irretrievable.

What stays is not the thing itself but the shape the thing left in us: a habit of pausing at that hour, the body's dumb fidelity.

Somewhere a window is being removed from a house being torn down. The glass holds nothing — no reflection, no room behind it — and still it catches

every color the sky is willing to give.