you, your lesson plan — us, by example

two low bookshelves of your diaries & notebooks of observation, arranged in a definition of their own & new chronology, you push them face to face and cover with a bedsheet

and you hold the bedsheet down under your largest glass dish like a basin, like a lake in a crater on the moon, and you fill the dish with hundreds of teeth, clattering, root-long teeth, grown of animals of more species than we know

we watch the teeth, the teeth grin like kaleidoscopes

you clear your throat and then over the teeth you pour ants, from a jar overwhelming ants, until they fill the gaps & cavities, cleave to roots, make themselves to black gums shiny & swarming, and then over the teeth you pour a paste

a paste invisible and thick and rich like mana, like the sand of a desert made of mana, and you place a lid on the dish

we watch

the ants root the paste, the fat cables of themselves pictured in time a tunneled graph, pictured in space an accidental filigree: the ants carry teeth on their backs, stand teeth in structurally significant places, bolster new absences over enameled columns — and this creates astonishing configurations in the teeth

the teeth that grin like kaleidoscopes grin like sharks, like the fruit of spherical jaws, mouths with no openings, mouths against themselves, mouths able to chew themselves alone: the teeth of incompatible animals nest in mosaics and, in a mouth of strange geometries, become the teeth of one comprehensive organism

and this mouth of tectonic plates shifting over ant backs in fault lines, this mouth that chews their world, the raw paste of their world suspended in glass atmosphere, it chews it to bits secreted down their tunnels, down arteries, down a network of blind intestines & of complex incomprehensible digestion

finally you resume our gaze and tell us

this is how you made yourself

we protest but you say

no don't show me anymore