P.S.: The autumn and the faun

 I live at the border between this prosaic world and others of thundering dark and seafoam and terra cotta, the worlds that enchant. I myself am not an enchantment, not the conjurer of wild visions in violet and silvery green and the wispy white of silken web. I am forever in exile from that world, being only a scholar with words.

In the spring, I met a faun, slender and pale as cream, freckled and innocent as a wild beast. Homely as only gingers can be, long-faced and jug-eared under his masses of hair. I asked him for a story.  I had forgotten — nobody can catch a faun in stillness very long. He smiled at me and ran off, no words spoken.

All summer, I played hide and seek with the faun. I would not tame the beast, because one can only live at the edges of those other worlds if one does not try to own them. I just wanted to hear his story, find the source of his fleeting magic. Fauns do not speak — they smile, and then disappear. I will never learn if that smile was meant for me, and the thought of that makes me feel sad, like I do when I get to the end of a book.

Now it is autumn, and I sense he is strolling across a filmy border to where he belongs. I will write in my warm house with chilly sunlight streaming through the window, where I belong. I will never know what words he would have for me. But I have seen him.