you must have been to learn
that the orbits of the planets
are elliptical, not circular—
that the backyard bees don't really
hibernate, they just
freeze to death in the winter—
that heroes and villains exist
on a post-hoc spectrum,
and not as some good-verses-
evil dialectic? With what perturbation,
then, do you think you'll react
when you once again find,
at the end of the line, that actually
nothing you ever believed in
was wrong?—your most stubborn
superstition, your lighthouses
of love for those ships long gone—
none of these fictions were destroyed
or disappeared; they merely
became blocked from view
by some mutable purpose
which was either larger, or emerged
in closer proximity to you.
