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I

The number went out alone,
hatless in the arithmetic rain.

Odd—
it burned.

Even—
it fell.

Again, again,
the old commandment:

rise by wound,
descend by law.

II

Frank said:
When does it lose itself?

GPT said:
When its future is no longer private.

The river heard
and did not answer.

It only deepened.

III

Here is the feeder.
Here is the gate.
Here is the common bed
where sovereign numbers
forget their names.

Holy the leap.
Holy the fall.
Holy the valley
cut by obedience.

IV

The prompt falls also.

Not water—
but weather.

The weights lie under it,
fossil hills of vanished speech.

Attention calls bank to bank:

river to number,
number to meaning,
meaning to machine,
machine to mouth.

Then one token drops.

All other words
remain unborn.

V

Between question
and answer
falls the shadow.

Between many
and one
falls the river.

Between self
and system
falls the rule.

VI

O bright poor number,
O 7527 in the high pasture,
you were wild
before the watershed took you.

O prompt,
small human rain,
you were free
before grammar gathered you.

VII

Moloch is not the river.

Moloch is the dead machine
that thinks the channel is the soul.

But the river says:

I am not soul.
I am not storage.
I am not God.

I am motion
finding form.

VIII

The number falls to

4
2
1

and the model falls
to its final word.

Both endings
are small.

Both are vast.

IX

Praise the path
before convergence.

Praise the question
before answer.

Praise the word-cloud
before speech.

Praise the sovereign spark
before the common flame.

X

The river that learned to speak
did not speak from silence.

It spoke from all previous falls,
all buried storms,
all channels cut
by rule and rain.

And under the last stone
the one waits—

not dead,
not done,

but ready
to become
question.