Incremental

The salt gave out this morning,

the last few grains

evacuating the shaker,

like the pen that refused to write last week

after countless notes and reminders,

grocery lists, and underlined passages—

the cumulative, quotidian uses

that consumed it.

These undetected, unobserved

metamorphoses from fullness to vacancy

are lessons in incrementality,

creeping imperceptibly

until one day, they reach a destination

or is it destiny?

And so we learn, often too late,

that the biggest movements,

life’s tectonic forces and erosions

come about in the smallest of increments.