A bear had wandered to Amalgam town;
its fur did not seem black, white, grey, nor brown,
and since we’d heard of no such other bear
we went our ways as if he weren’t there.

_
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 constitutes my compliance with that instruction. I will post one each Thursday until they are exhausted.