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I received a surprise invitation to a tryout camp at Ebbets Field.

I didn’t want to start a poem with night where there should be a name.

Loving you is every bit as fine as coming over a hill into the sun.

Under Saint Peter’s Gate, I put good foot after bad, and derided, I chased.

The windshield’s dirty, the squirter stuff’s all gone, so we drive on.

I’m tired of the song the rain sings in June, the chorus of hope.

I lean I stumble toward you hoping you’ve not turned away yet.

Maybe it’s a Thursday, & I’m coming home to make you dinner.

Show me your darkness, your nothing-to-see and everything to touch.

Forgive me, please, for continuing to believe that roses are beautiful.

All of this leaves me floating in seas of prehistory and indeterminacy.

What felt like sanctity now felt like nothingness, like death.

I used to be known for the humor of my music, the lightness of touch.

I wound through the Gothic castle buildings in the university.

The men here don’t know where to place me, call me exotic grail.

Lust for power and money undermined their morality and common sense.

All I know is not in front of me, my sweet angels.

I halt and watch a monk, under plum boughs, sweeping flitting shreds.

Upon his supine monstrous shape there was a colossal inertia.

No one asked that, changed as he was, he do more than survive.

He got people on the conveyor belt that carried them up to heaven.

I sobbed even through hymns sung too gently to lend me cover

It’s difficult to be blessed by Madam Pele. She gives wonderful trouble.

Walking through the snow with her was enough, quiet enough.

I keep waking up on the edge of the black lake. He’s on the other side.

Her previous existence seemed unreal, now, a faint rumor.

She looks in the mirror above the sink, and her image makes eye contact.

Rise the Euphrates, my first novel, grew out of a feverish dream.