I literally laughed out loud when I got the letter
followed by a whoop, a gasp, and a wide-mouthed stare
astonished that after thirty-seven futile submissions
my application had been accepted
by not one but two writer’s fellowships,
separated by a yawning diagonal of 2,782 miles
meandering from NYU to USC.
Having spent the last month condemned to an adjunct purgatory
that would crush the Pilgrim's faith, with or without Virgil,
I must choose between Trojan Scylla and Gotham Charybdis;
no more stinging wasps and hornets
pursuing me on the plains of Cook County.
Then I saw all the empty seats at
Dodger Stadium for Game 5 of the NLCS and wondered
how I could go to a wasteland
where so few could see the beauty
when Clayton Kershaw bent a 95-mile-an-hour slider
around the barrel of a 39-inch
bat or the grace
of Yasiel Puig scooping a line-drive on one hop and gunning
it to third to justly halt a greedy runner.
Even with the Met, Guggenheim, and Frick,
there’s always a line to see the house that Ruth built,
or at least the empty lot where it once stood.