Dear son of Memory, great heir of fame,

let loose a plague of words,

Mixing up verses, eras, words. Songs from stupid musicals. Coming in strong on the easy refrains.

Deor was my name. For years I enjoyed     my duties as minstrel and that lord’s favor,     but now the freehold and land titles     he bestowed upon me once he has vested in Heorrenda,     master of verse-craft. That passed over,     this can too.

Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat, Select the prince from a row of identical masks,

The dog Cerberus relaxed his guard; the wheel of Ixion stood motionless; Sisiphus sat at rest upon his stone; Tantalus forgot his thirst;

though small against the black, small against the formless rocks, hell must break before I am lost;

my hell is no worse than yours

Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil— by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet— “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”