“Where love in its laughing guises, / Tells how the sun also rises”
—H.R. Stoneback

I walked into Humanities 108,
In the third time, Muse-Song, writing.
The first was written in Paris,
In the Moveable Feast at the table

Where presides that twinkle in Santa-Claus-eyes,
The rolling sound, the door slams open,
As it slammed those many years ago,
Bright-eyed, strong, without fear,

Carrying that large record-player
Where Eliot, Pound, and the rest of Modern-Muses
Recite their verse as they did in Paris.
On that same player, the voice of an Angel

Singing in the shape of a Sparrow
In the Lecture Center of the school of the Hawk.
There Sparrow sings eternal,
Year after year, the Angel I wish I knew, 

And somehow know whenever sparrows
Fly past keen, sharp-eyes,
Eyes like Burroughs’ who knew to sit
And listen to the songs that never truly cease,

No matter what Whitman, bless his soul,
May say among the rolling of the waves
At the breaking of the day, or of the waters
Lapping on the Hudson, the ice-breaking

In the winter, the trout leaping in Black Creek
Among the Slabsides, or far up the headwaters
Of the Rondout rounding its way up the river
And down to the sea, onward and upward.

Lord, let me sing by the Hudson,
As Jerry Jeff Walker sang that song,
Of Durrell books in a great big sack,
With Black-Cat wine, wise Stoneback:

And Stoney still tells tall tales
The taller they are, the truer they are,
As Red Warren once said, true as EMR
Through Roland’s horn-cry jump-shot-clean-through
The bells of St. Lucy and Notre Dame, Sacre Coeur
And Roncevaux, where Durendale still cuts the valley
WhereThe Sun Also Rises as the next, great Romero
Swings his cape through the next Veronica,
Where the sun shines deep beneath the waves
Of San Sebastián, where the stars still gleam
In the field, campus stellae, Compostela,
As old man Santiago sails the Stream-

And one line remains so free,
True at the end of all drafts three-
And so this song my soul will sate:
I walked into Humanities 108.

Nota bene: The number, “108,” should be read as spoken rhythmically: “One-hundred-and-eight.”