And That’s Why We Write Stories

The Enigma We Answer by
Living

Einstein didn’t speak as a
child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his
head.

I do the thing, he later
wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which
he swims?

This came up in
conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a
friend,

who passed through town
carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he’d collected in the Grand
Canyon—

one for mosquitoes, one for
honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row,
pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic
differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper
down

he hiked, the older the
rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the
universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each
innovation,

though he knows it will all
disappear—
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old
friends and the new,

that it’s wrong to think
people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we’d sprung
from an idea
out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval
mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of
a beautiful planet

that’s made us want to
name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the
vanishing.

~ Alison
Hawthorne Deming ~

2 Replies to “And That’s Why We Write Stories”

2 Replies to “And That’s Why We Write Stories”