Waiting for the tale to begin

Waiting for the tale to begin,

not knowing that we are the tale,

that it began with us

and that with us it will end.

There was many a false start

but always the electrons were busy,

that dance in which to perish

was to survive in a different orbit.

We asked our questions and passed

on. The answer, discovered

by others, was to a different question.

Yet they, too, had the feeling

of having been here before.

We are our own ghosts, haunting

and haunted. We live out a dream,

unable to equate the face

with the owner, the voice

with the speaker, the singer

with the song. Ah, how we thought

science would deliver us, when

all it has done is to set us

circling a little more swiftly

about a self that is an echo.