It is the endless hunger
the lake eating the shore
the bitter eating into your basil leaves
because you did not, would not
pinch off the pale purple flowers
just as they appeared, their delicate heads
brushing against the kitchen window.

It is slipping the string from the back
of a snap pea, pinning it
between your fingernails, wondering
how such fine floss, such a slim little wisp,
could make any difference to the pea, let alone
the dinner, but what if it does, what if it is in fact
all the difference, what if it is
this single thread that unravels the whole dish,
the whole evening,
the whole enterprise on which you are embarked,
miles now from the crumbling shore?

It is why you sit in a coffee shop
and search on your phone for images of buttons,
and scroll on and on as they keep loading,
round buttons, square buttons, triangle buttons,
red green spotted beige the color of burnt wood
bronze ivory tin
buttons made out of a nut called tacua
buttons upholstered like sofa arms
buttons that curve to a point like a shark's tooth,
like a crooked finger,
like the ribs wrapped around the rapid shallow breaths
of a very small animal, an animal
who may spend all its life tunneling through loose earth,
guided by smell, by scratches and thuds,
until it stumbles one day into the cavern beneath a tall tree
and loses itself in a forest of roots reaching like branches
into the dark.