“The fox was, perhaps, just a bit dishonest. . . . ‘And what makes you think a fox has got anything to teach a god, eh?’”
It’s surpassingly strange that this universe
Appears to be the way it appears to be, and
Surpassingly strange that we should find it to be
Strange, who are all its offspring but forever
Straining to change or reimagine everything.
It deepens the suspicion that we are players
In the only game not of our own making. If
Not, we are the only game we know, aching
To create an alternate universe without
Surrendering our awareness that it is only
An alternate, a pretend. A game’s a barricade
Against the real, but both the real and the game
Depend on the reality of that barricade. If
The barricade itself is too porous, a bit dishonest,
Then it’s not that there’s an illusion, nor that all
Must be illusion, false, but that the distinction
Implicit in the very idea of illusion won’t hold,
And if it doesn’t hold, any capacity to be just
A game, to play a game, to play, to pretend,
Must die. There’s no pretend if there’s no lie,
No possibility of articulating the difference
Between the courtyard of the latest emperor, where
We perform our bounded stories, and the actual sky.
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