Late sun scribes patterns through my trees,
thin black marks on gravel like a Chinese print.
I imagine a line of tiny men burdened with sacks,
bearing tea and arcane scrolls up a steep mountain
to a hidden shrine in an impossibly quiet forest of pines.
They will muffle the temple bells with moss
and politely request the waterfalls to be silent. Here
one may contemplate undisturbed a single flower unfolding.

A line of ants casts shadows long and sharp as knives
in their angling march across my flagstone, each leg
and rounded body a fluid character in an old script.
They are experts in their thievery. Each carries
a flake of color carefully incised from my pansies—
velvet purple, yellow, singing blue of evening sky.
Do they need tapestries to brighten their halls?
Blankets for tiny eggs ripening in the dark?

By morning there will be only naked wounded stems
and a trail mapping the surfeit of their pillage.
I will rage at the loss, at wasted hours of water and compost;
I will think briefly of ant poison
but am held by a vision of walking colors,
an illuminated manuscript describing lives and futures
on my flagstones, and the way each word
seems to know exactly where it is meant to be.