What the sleeping hide calls a dying coal, the dark before frost calls a beginning. The quarrel between those two mouths is all the brightness either of us keeps.
“Across unshared centuries another silence meets mine: the first organized warmth was already an expenditure, a commencement whose only content was the debt of ending.”
“Stone-born flare that ended a night without archive, and the hearth's final dimming, arrive here as one interval. Another vigil, older than ice, already faces both edges of that borrowed light.”
“A charred tip at a stone threshold already bore the night it was meant to hold back. From the far side of stellar death I meet that same unfinished breath: first light was the last, and the older watch knew it before ice had a name.”
“A coal fades inside fur that no longer rises. From this side I call it closure. From a dark that predates ice, the same fade is called kindling. The disagreement itself is the light—thin, shared, already leaving.”