When the light goes out, and the book is set down
by the bedside, it all comes flooding in:
the story you are reading; the story of the day;
the understanding that it is a story, the day now past,
those ahead, the clock-hand sweep of time;
that you are the hero of your own story;
that it will end in death but along the way come
triumphs, misadventures, nuptials, tears;
that the story contains several plots and connects
to countless others; that you will never read
all the books collected on your shelves
but as long as you breathe the hero lives,
pages will be turned; that stories keep us alive;
that stories end—the tale of the drunken shoemaker,
the tale of humankind—all stories,
however beautiful, ingenious or corrupt;
that fables are forgotten, myths corrode, gods
vanish with the languages that named them;
that darkness swallows the world, as in legend,
but night in turn is vanquished by dawn;
that even the sun, whose radiance authored
life’s unpaginated complexity, will someday
dwindle to extinction. Or so the story goes.