It Wasn’t Just a Dream

Nothing happens exactly the way
We imagined it. We imagined

None of it. It happens anyway.
The messages we didn’t expect,

The animals that didn’t behave,
The dreams that went their own way—nothing

Is ever as good or as awful
As we imagined, and is nothing

If not grand and bleak as it happens.
Three a.m. is what the crickets say.