Keaton Bassett

May 17, 2026

In my fortieth year, I am trapped in a carousel of thought and action. I know the size and shape of every input and I slot them each into their time-worn synapses with horrifying absence of question or wonder. I am stewarded by myriad ghosts of my myriad former selves, each with its living-dead hands hooked into the sinews of my flesh, manipulating my movement like that of a marionette wandering toward oblivion. There is no room in my periphery: the world slides away on either side. The thin quivering future is always, always and only directly in front of me.

But how did the expansive earth reduce to just this plank? On a cloudless night in the glance of stars I recall the absolute breadth of life. I see in bursts of starlight—and then the vision recedes. I carry its residue like a sliver of glass, burning and beloved, embedded in the very foot of my consciousness.

As I look out the window this morning, every surface is awash in sunlight, and I, like the air, might filter across any one of them and lead my shadow freely to cascade over staircases, sidewalks, gardens, the feet of strangers, any one of whom might smile. But I remain seated at the window. Something is not working.

It occurs to me that somewhere I have made a mistake, miscalculated the area of possibility, misplaced the decimal, missed an angel’s instruction. It is as though something fundamental to me were curtailed; that my brief name were but murmured on the weightless tail of a shallow breath, its title unconferred and its charge unrecognized.

So I consider the fundamental: first steps, first words, placing block atop block, holding a crayon, and—finally—inevitably—I consider the counting from one to ten. Because to pass through a room you had to have entered it, and so on, forever. And the earliest instruments by which we order the world are among the first opportunities for error: so the child believes the path ahead to be no wider than its foot.

When I learned my numbers, I counted them on my fingers; I ordered them as I oriented myself. Now so oriented, I fear they and I are fixed. It is as though—softly—a door has closed behind me, and left me at this window.

I remember the feeling when, in childhood, returning from some unplanned getaway, my mind would settle back into my body in the classroom, cold and uneasy to know I had missed something important on which I would be tested. This is a similar feeling, only the test has long since commenced (and will conclude suddenly). The suite of poems, Counting from One to Ten, is an attempt to address this naked discomfort as well as the narrowing field as vision approaches its event horizon.

Unfortunately, I am a determinist, which is to say that the width of the step is of enormous consequence to me. So, if I were to find that the first step is broader than I initially understood it to be, then all subsequent steps may also be broader. The path that I have travelled will remain as it had always been, and the path ahead shall likewise be no different, but my sense may be completely altered and my experience fuller. By opening the words to which we are bound, we expand the acreage of our pen, uncovering the dimension of the life we share in it.

Of this, and of anything I have managed to generate, I am mostly ignorant. I am most interested in the shadow’s penumbra into which I see only hazily. So, I stammer on about what I may or may not understand, hopeful to speak something the truth of which I will be immediately convinced. By this process, I will have pushed at my limit and thereby grown.

It all relates back to this fear I hold which is that—whatever I am—I am not more. So, the number is its mere self until I begin straining to see something more in it—at which point, it and I are more.

There is something reassuring in this: meaning that opens out from a small-seeming thing, an interior extending indefinitely beyond the surface by which it first appears. One could turn such a thing in their hands for a lifetime and never exhaust it. For the poem is an unfolding. It is a widened plane on which, for its diminished periphery, we may better focus; on which, for its better focus, we may apprehend more detail. The poem does not enlarge the object itself; rather, it enlarges the attention brought to it. Like so, I am as 9's inelegant subject: bent to plumb its shallow bowl, yet gazing with all love and hope toward the ineffable X.