OPEN BOOK

If trees and moss were bound and stitched to a forest floor

Like pages to leather covers;

Nature would be a narrative, like an open book,

Spine aligned with front and back pages,

Leaves slightly bowed up from the center

Or flipped backwards and forwards in a light wind.

Days would be marked on the pages and ordinary things would

Drive the action:  a tree might lose a limb; a fox might catch a rabbit.

As actions become a plot, sometimes on stage,

Sometimes behind the foliage,

The number of characters would be endless,

And on the surface all would appear as a setting where

Only the most obvious plots could be read.

A narrative assumes detail; leaves it hidden between the lines,

Sums it up in a word or a sentence, ignores what is presumed irrelevant,

Because only the largest plots can be discerned

While swarms of the smallest bits and pieces that

Assemble, disassemble, and reassemble,  

Create subplots that virtually appear and disappear.

If a writer were to capture a bit of it, and

Another writer were to capture another bit of it,

Would the sum of the plots and subplots of all the writers create a universe,

Like a Borges Library, or would it always be incomplete,

Like an alphabet of infinite characters with something always outside of it?

© cmheuer, 2013