Some Unfinished Notes on the Ethics of Wanting —— There are evenings when the sky forgets its own grammar— clouds suspended like unfinished sentences, light breaking against the ribs of glass, and I, a body of unanswered verbs, walk through a forest that keeps rehearsing absence. I have no god to accuse. No altar where I can place this ache like a bowl of overripe fruit. And yet—something unnamed moves beneath the soil, a patient intelligence of roots and dark water, a grammar older than belief. To that— not deity, not mercy, not design— but the quiet mathematics of becoming and unbecoming, I speak. Take it, I say— this surplus of reaching. This body that keeps leaning as if another shore were promised. Take the river out of my veins— or still it, at least, so it no longer mistakes every stone for the beginning of a bridge. Because everywhere— in the curve of swan-feet tracing water, in the pollen-drift of late afternoon, in the sudden generosity of sun on bark— the world conspires toward union of seasons. If there is a force— not god, but something quieter, more exact— the way light edits shadow, the way pruning teaches the rose its restraint— let it come with its invisible shears. Cut me back to clarity. Strip the branches of this wanting. Let my hands forget their hunger for another pulse. Let the glass of me hold only sky— uninterrupted, uninhabited— a clean expanse where no face forms from breath. Because I am tired of mistaking every reflection for arrival, every echo for an answer, every soft thing for a promise. And yet— even as I ask for erasure, a leaf falls against my shoulder with unbearable gentleness. And I understand— the forest does not remove its longing. It learns to carry it as fragrance, as shadow, as the quiet, persistent greening of what cannot be touched and will not cease. —- S•S