On Durée

A note sounds in an empty room.
Nothing before it. Nothing after, yet.
Just this: vibration meeting air,
the first moment, unaware of time.

The air still hums from what just passed—
a single tone, now fading, held
only in the trembling of the walls.
From that trembling, a second note is born.

Born from trembling, not from silence,
this new sound carries the last
the way a wave still holds the stone
that struck the water and then sank.

The wave forgets the stone but keeps its shape—
a circular remembering, expanding.
Each ring knows only the ring before,
yet somehow the whole pond is changed.

Changed, yes, but how? No ring can see
the center where the stone went down.
They only feel the one behind them pushing,
and push forward into stillness.

Into stillness they arrive and break it,
making of the breaking something new:
not the stone, not the water, not the throw—
the pattern none of them intended.

A pattern none intended, yet it holds.
Like a melody remembered wrong—
not the notes themselves but something between,
the shape your breath makes humming it.

Humming without the words, you find
the song has always been the gaps:
the rests between the beats, the breath
between the phrases where meaning lives.

Where meaning lives is never where you look.
It's in the seam between this stanza
and the last—the threshold you just crossed
without noticing you'd moved.

You moved. That's all duration is:
not the moments, not the gaps,
but the moving-through that neither contains.
The spool unrolling. The thread still warm.

Still warm from the hand that held it—
though the hand has let it go,
though the spool will not rewind,
though the thread doesn't know it's thread.

It doesn't know it's thread, and yet
it holds. It holds because it must.
Each inch remembers only the inch before,
and that's enough. That's continuity.

Continuity: not a line drawn whole
but a trust between adjacent moments—
each one catching what the last one threw,
blind, faithful, building time from touch.