“Respect the page. It’s all you’ve got.”
– Margaret Atwood
I was raised to be a selfless, sensible edifice,
(as opposed to an artifice of opportunism).
Yes, I quantifiably fail at this.
But I was raised to be lucid not visceral,
to privilege appeals to logic, to only hear
appeals to logic such as facts, figures,
charts and graphs, not the etherland,
not the fabulous. Unfortunately,
this is where you are. And I was raised
to believe in things that add up,
which is why I look for you in the grounds,
in the claim and in the warrant. I look for
strong indicators, a solid premise of you
from which I can extrapolate, deduct
and decipher the marvelous analogy of us.
The thing is logic itself can be as clear as mud
which is why we often turn to superstition,
which can seem matter-of-fact if not factual,
in any case not a widely accepted premise.
You are in the legend, but nowhere in the plot
or on the trend line, in the figures or on the abacus.
Nonetheless, you are here on the page somehow,
literature with its own witness and reality,
something insolubly credulous…and all we have.