My friends, the catastrophes came to greet me.
Of pleasure, I’d had too much. Erasure
was the order of the day. Goodbye lover, goodbye
house and home, goodbye life’s savings.
One is increasingly minor, which is one way
to fly low over the city
where Tyson bit off Evander’s ear,
then Van Gogh’s ear, the ear of my ex-wife.
But I too was hounded by a piercing cry.
Maybe it was just a crow; more likely
one of those turgid voices inside struck me
with that dizzying just-hit-your-head feeling,
as if god’s emissary had entered me
in a dream or on some lower rung on the ladder,
a brocade of shadow and light so clearly chiseled out
that, ok, my speech was three feet ahead of me.