Cause-and-effect explains how narration works
like singular step-by-steps of time, if-then, why-because.
I spend a lot of my time going back to before,
before this story, the original because, and then
all the proliferating thens, all the moves-misunderstandings,
all the figures and letters. Possibly this feeds my desire
to outline and create order from noise,
which is itself a problem of cause.
We can’t always trace the untraceable,
organize what is not outline-able, like Romans
and their numerals marching right off the paper.
Even doing nothing has its unintended consequences,
those little brats of cause and effect. Silence
spreads like groundwater under a field
and into the forest, root to root like gossip
between all the trees. Things grow and die in it.
We can list a long line of causes and only guess
at their infinite effects and then the real relation
is never clear. State our situations, state a thesis,
bodies full of paragraphs, sad little evidence,
present our grand conclusions to ourselves
about this and then that.
But there are always additional questions then,
which keep stories and their sequels propagating
and pontificating like a bereaved raven calling
and answering itself into the haunted forever more.