I had been reading about the ancient literary collections in Latin and Greek called ‘paradoxographies,’ which were assemblages of brief notations of bizarre occurrences considered portentous, bewildering, wonderful, and strange: monstrous births, miraculous weather phenomena, astonishing reports of the barely believable but urgently interpretable events of the world. This poem came to me first through a series of urgent dreams: lines that later made their way into the poem reciting themselves insistently over and over until I woke up and scribbled them down. I found pages the next morning with strange paradoxical fragments and urgent pieces of prophecy and advice scribbled all over them, lines I had forgotten I had dreamed or written down, which seemed paradoxigraphical itself. The poem’s fragments of strangeness came out of those lines. This is the first poem for a manuscript I’m finishing called PARADOX DOXOLOGY that considers the strangenesses and wonders of the turn of the 21st century, from robot public service operators to genetic engineering to mood-altering neurosurgery: a ‘paradoxography’ for the new millennium. (Bruce Beasley) Year’s End …