Though the Mountains Divide And the Oceans Are Wide

Minuscule Things:

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it,

and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle

there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection

that could contain, like a microchip, an epic

treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld.

And at the base of our glass there’s nothing

so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous

patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text

so short it consists only of the author’s signature,

which has to stand, like the future, for what might

have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life.

Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s

like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched

Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets

a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!

William Matthews.