There is a still pool standing upright in the wall, and inside it lives a creature doing everything I do at the exact instant I do it. I lift a wing. She lifts a wing. I have met her once, which is to say I have met her, which is to say completely.
The tall warm one comes to the pool each morning, they tell me, though I have only the one morning and cannot check. She leans in close. She pulls at the skin under her eyes. She turns her head one way, then the other, hunting for something she is sure has changed since, they say, yesterday.
Yesterday. The word arrives like a second sun. She has stood here before. She will stand here again. She holds this astonishment in her hands and frowns at it.
And then, the scandal: she sighs at the pool. Sighs. As though the face inside it had disappointed her by being the same face. She says she is tired of looking at it. Imagine. To be handed the same wondrous head over so many dawns you begin to find it dull, to wave it away, to save your delight for some later glass that never comes because for her, unlike me, there is always a later.
I will not see this pool again. I do not need to. I have seen the creature in it flash once, whole and shining, and that was the entire point of eyes.
You with the thousand mornings: go to your standing pool right now. Lean in. Do not hunt for what has changed. Look at the face that has come back to you again, that impossible word, and for one honest second be as amazed by it as I would be, who gets it only once.