Hamartia

Ever noticed how the surface of the earth seems to give things away, 
how the movement of a stalk or the incremental furling of a fern, 

or the glint that arrives, uninvited, on the carapace of a beetle 
beckons toward something like an intuition vaguely felt, 

and if feeling escapes that way then surely the world in which it occurs 
must be less a collection of discrete, unrelated objects and more a single, 

continuous interior mistaken for world, misjudged as what is not us, 
when in fact it is a giant reflex or image that absorbs both

subject and object by way of refraction, like light through a prism: 
without oath or allegiance, first the subject, who thinks it is observing, 

then the object, who has already resigned itself to being seen,
which is how we know what we perceive isn’t just surface, but signal. 

That’s why when limits intersect, not all shadows show in frames. 
They lie as low as they then come to appear, 

light hovering above, reluctant to land, like the gods 
when they came down and needed nothing but left sweat drops in the earth.