Mike Stone's "Fact" is about loss and the stubborn habit of hoping. A young woman appears suddenly in the speaker's life, smiles, speaks, and vanishes just as quickly. Her words run together in one breathless, unspaced line, as if the moment was so quick and urgent that it can barely be held onto. After that, the speaker rearranges everything around her possible return: clearing out "unnecessaries," going to the place where she was, and waiting to feel her hands over his eyes.
The mood is quiet and aching. The imagined touch, "tingling in their warmth," is tender, but the poem keeps interrupting it with a flat, cold refrain: "They never come back." Calling it a "fact" suggests the speaker knows the truth and cannot make himself believe it. Her unfinished sentence, "to where she," hints at how hope trails off when it meets reality. The poem leaves us with the contrast between longing and certainty, and the certainty wins.