No Exceptions

Covert authorial intentions
Tiptoe through the shadows like shadows

Themselves. Don’t count on noticing them
Or exposing them. You need a grip

On chronology, especially
Clocks and calendars, lunar cycles,

The vocabulary to describe
Time as supernatural event

Greatly elaborating changes
In your experienced sense of self.

What I remember now is silence,
But I’m sure I heard a growing life

Pushing up from the dirt, shredding dust,
Uncoiling in a long narrative

Of many non-narrative segments,
Adding phrases like bits of armor

Or camouflage. Frail as each segment
Was, it was wonderful to witness

The tiny pieces working through them,
Their gears digesting meanings like meals

You could see through the translucent skin
Of their larval-stage leviathan,

Deflections of conversation, birds
Overnight in the tree by the creek,

The coming of spring, the subtle blues
And roses, the pinks, the gold-green dawns

Of a plague season in the desert,
The morning shoving the moonlit gate

To the grassy pasture in the oaks,
Trying to get the night to open.

And there’s your book then, phenomenon
Of insight and nonsense in ruins,

Garbled, gabbling conglomeration
Of wet leaves, thoughts, light bones, and refuse.