No one else’s
landscape will be exactly
the same as yours. Either the water’s
gone downstream a micro-
metre, or the rocks have aged
a grain in the sands of Earth.
Or maybe the Nikon you’ve been
toting weighs you down,
like a feather & a camel’s back.
The caboodle will have dominoed
by then.
The clouds have strayed
the length of a fruit fly’s
wing—in your half-Planck
hesitation. Your hands have quaked
a magnitude minus twelve.
A duck has shook her head of
excess wet, a single drop astray,
like you whenever you step
out from the shower. Everything’s
pornographic in the light.
There’s a gnat, grappling for its
life in a silken cirrus;
the patience of the spider that
you’d see—if you focused on the
sapling past the banks—
sloughing off its leaves
as though burlesque.
Take your gaze up to the core
& try again. It’s there in
tinted glass—a cyclist inching closer
to the corner she’ll be struck,
the driver with his
gawp upon the rearview,
pondering how his beard is
asymmetric, or perhaps he spots
the dated, peanut peddler—there
between the lamppost &
the mailbox no one uses
anymore, aflake like seborrhea,
as out-of-place & time
as a fedora—tumbling on the
sidewalk in the undertow of
air; someone in the distance
giving chase—
if it wasn’t for your
blink you would have noted;
if you hadn’t wiped your lens
as if your eye, fretting the blur
of every face you know you’ll
never see again this wretched life.
Andreas Gripp
October 5, 2026
photograph: Vivian Maier (self-portrait)
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