Which always dispenses the exact amount
Or maybe just a funky reflection
Glinting off the pearlescent interior
That shifts or even disappears
With the slightest change in position
A severity vulnerable to the touch
But nature too herself plays
The carnival of artifice
Completely familiar
In those mimetic beasts and plants yes
Oracles of magnetism and arcane particles
Taxonomy most diverting
But also in her very mode of presentation
In the languorous waving fronds
Couthe in sondry londes
In seemingly two or more or fewer dimensions
In splash of color or dull monochrome
Shot through with sorrow
Like a matrix of punishment
Less a retaliation than a theater
Albeit of cruelty
Or festooned with the appurtenances of joy
A ravishing discharge
Of petals clouds lights wings and songs
Or the grinding low-grade malaise of ennui
The sluggish awakenings of flowers and reptiles
On cold and overcast spring mornings
The inchoate desires of infancy
The painful complaints of age
Always representations
Such that even the coveted all-access pass
Apparently so limited in its distribution
If extensive in its application
Translates some earlier document
Inscribed in concrete or sibylline leaves
Past and past past bark past fossil ripples
Product of potions or toxic fumes
And respectively their viscosity and opacity
Brittle teraphim and hieratic geomancy
Themselves merely adaptations
Of commonplace phenomena
We thrown into a deep deep well
Make pitiful gestures of weight and measure
You might as well wish upon a star
Map the progress of migratory fowl