L.A. Fellowship

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.

Ascension Island

Ascension Island

[7°56´S 14°25´W]

for Leendert Hasenbosch(1695 – 1725?)

The loneliest sin is the greatest treason.

Father and sisters off to Batavia,

half a world away.

Anchored in the Hague [52°5´N  4°19´E],

you fend in that wilderness

Cruise those sooty streets and sullen corridors                Silence at every encounter

Survival requires adaptation.

You are a soldier, writer, bookkeeper

Scrawling accounts for final tally

All will be reconciled at the audit.

Set sail for the Dutch East Indies [6°125´S  106°49´E],

passage bought and paid for

How did you err,                                what clue revealed your predilection?

Betrayed by a fellow

Caught in the act

Or merely an errant glance at                                      your man Friday?

No matter, justice will be done

in the company’s slave port of Cape Town, no less [33°55´S  18°25´E].

Cast away twenty-five-hundred nautical miles to

a treeless cinder, lava cooled but little else

as if Elba and St. Helena were too close                             for your kind

and you                                    the more feared invader.

Water water everywhere, and only blood to drink,

after the albatross and turtle, a man consumes himself.

No bones lay blanched by solar bleakness

only an emaciated

diary where you confess

 your mortal sin, and beg

not forgiveness, only

Mercy                                        

A clean, gentle death.

So it was that heaven had its vengeance                            and sodomy punish’d

If only heaven was more forgiving, could you

have ascended and been given a seat,

not at the right hand,

but with His whores and thieves?

No man is an island, indeed.

Except those castaway and

          seared into holy solitude.