When Dauviere came by Amalgam’s way,
he said he could not leave but could not stay:
forever he was trapped right where he stood,
and then he left the river town for good.

I wrote the Amalgam poems in the mid-1990s while nearly napping under a tree. They were seemingly nonsensical stanzas about a fictional town named Amalgam, its residents, and its larger world. I collected them one-by-one in a word processing file, which I printed and stashed away in a notebook.

In November 2009, I had a dream in which a hit man chased me and a group of “dream acquaintances” deep into the sub-cellar of an abandoned military building. In a room at the base of a rubble-filled shaft, he warned me to “dig up the Amalgam poems and post them.”

This poem completes my compliance with that instruction. I have posted one each Thursday, and now they are exhausted.