an ant fell in between the page
of the book,
even its own silence it does not understand.
from where to climb it does not know,
all steps carve discourse;
staggering in its littleness, its fragile
mind takes on the mystery of star
and its delicate body swells in the sheen
of words.
as in the night, it trails the moon's slender stem that transfixes
a constellation's ephemerality:
a soldier tumbled over, undulant,
amazed in betweenness of light
and dark when god himself dies
before his fall was born,
o trencherman, deep in the peril
of a word's closing, fusion of
knowledge's breakwater and permutations of bluntness,
the unwelcoming abyss is your kingdom,
unwillingly enduring the taut blow
without purpose — when the book is shut, to what dark do you imagine your
eyes? to what enigma does your senses
wake up to? and to what erudition does
your silence keep flowering?
an ant fell into the book, and in its turning page, it rides each changing wave like
the white in its pale, blue horse,
arriving at different shores, yet all the same, a notable fate: stilled and dizzy
washed and unmoving in the abject night.