MagicAbout this book
To be sure to see magic everywhere, you don’t need to believe in it, since as a species we’re designed to see what others see. If your capacity for empathy is broken or a little sketchy, then work on it, since there’s no shame but considerable pleasure in sharing common illusions. Things don’t fall out when you open your mind.
Love, for example, is a magical bond, a shared deception, that rewards both love and loved one. Stage magic is also a deception, but its charm derives from the fact that we know it’s not real. Religions rely on magical assumptions; their charm derives from the fact that people believe them. Then we have science and technology, which you might not understand but don’t need to believe in. >As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The cover features my drawing of a design from an Egyptian makeup kit.
Links and shortcuts
In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.
- Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
- The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
- Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.
You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).
| Context | Keys | Jump to / Behavior |
|---|---|---|
| cover | ⌥ ◄ | Books by Tom Sharp |
| ⌥ ▲ | About Tom Sharp | |
| ⌥ ► | about this book (this page) | |
| ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| ⇧ ⌥ ▼ | contents | |
| contents | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | cover |
| ⌥ ▼ | select the next item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | select the previous item in the contents | |
| ⌥ ► | open the selected page | |
| ⌥ ⏎ | open the selected page | |
| poem | ⇧ ⌥ ▲ | contents |
| ⌥ ◄ | contents | |
| ⌥ ▲ | open the previous page | |
| ⌥ ▼ | open the next page |
The poet
Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).
You may email tom/AT/liztomsharp/DOT/-c-o-m-/ to share comments on this work.
