26

“I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”   Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried, quoted on The Writers Almanac, 1 Oct. 2019

So no matter our mood, how can we claim
to live in a world without magic or mystery?
We walk around for years, we hear and see and
wander with our minds.
Early or late, we each of us bump into them
in libraries or schools, laundromats or the
bookshelves of old boyfriends–
These are people.
They are fashioned from
26 shapes, cousins and courtesans,
shop keepers, a shepherd we recognize
shuffled again and again
into new people with surprising worries,
unfamiliar clothes and wars and weddings,
errands to run and meals to eat while
outside it begins to rain hard
here in this, the happening world