I have seen how the earth erodes differently from the way that trust does. Likewise, I know what it means, to come to love all over again the very mistakes I also know, looking back, I might better have strayed clear of. Two points make a line—but so does one point, surely, when pulled at once in two opposed directions: how to turn away from what’s familiar, for example, toward what isn’t

defines hope well enough, but can define, too, despair… When I look around at all the wood that’s drifted ashore, been bleached clean, and stranded, I think to be stranded must mean giving in to whatever forces make of strandedness over time such smooth-to-the-hand forms of trophy as these before me now, each one

distinctive. There’s a light that can make finding a thing look more than faintly like falling across it—you must kneel, make an offering. I threw my compass away years ago. I have passed through that light.