Genji Monogatari: The Eastern Cottage

Put a Miles Davis
compilation on the
CD player, then
settled down to read
how Médecins Sans
Frontières were hoping
to halt the persistent
poverty in Appalachia
by using a new class of
luminescent "quantum dot"
nanoparticles. The People
of Light vs the People of
Darkness—two radically
divergent self-defining
narratives yet simultaneously
lived. Perhaps a paradigm, a
path to a unified theory of
everything, whose syntax
encompasses divergent
metaphors but is incapable
of uttering a syllable that
strikes the cultivated ear
as correct. He caught a
glimpse, in the bright
moonlight, of a poem
in a shaky old hand.