THE LAW THE LEAF REMEMBERS
(on rhyme, and Its refusal)
Nature does not govern; she proceeds,
a rhythm older than our needs,
sufficient without plan or plea,
exact where we refuse to be.
Conditions hold while balance stays;
disturb the cadence—systems fray.
No warning rises, none is sent;
the cost arrives as consequence.
We learned to count, to name, to prove,
mistook precision for the move.
Laplace reduced the sky to parts
and mistook silence for an art.
Entropy kept faithful time,
charging loss for borrowed form.
Nothing vicious in the rate—
only patience we misnamed as fate.
Gaia tuned the seas and air
by feedback, not by thought or care.
The world endured because it flowed,
not because it could be known.
Then entered us, with finer knives,
dividing rhythm into lives,
cutting measure into rule,
calling interruption “control.”
Here the poem breaks—
not from error,
but excess.
Too much intelligence.
Too much correction.
Too many hands improving what was not broken.
The leaf retains its visible design:
vein, pigment, geometry.
The exchange is gone.
No method restores it.
No theory forgives the cut.
Animals meet limits by resistance alone.
They stop.
They yield.
They remain.
We persist.
Nature does not punish.
She withdraws coherence.
Climate keeps the account.
Chemistry enforces the terms.
Extinction enters without malice—
only completion.
What cannot rejoin
its sustaining rhythm
does not return whole.
The law does not ask
whether the cut was careful.
The law continues.
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