blàr anam [32]

I think it was Richard Dawkins who’d said something along the lines of superstition being essentially hardwired into the human mind. My Uncle Tib (Louis Freeman) had been in Europe during WWII with the 1637th Engineer Construction Battalion when his brother Arthur (again, my grandfather) was with the 13th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. Tib died while I was writing this poem. His dog Rosebud had passed away just before he had, and during our last conversation, Tib told me over the phone that Rosebud would come to him in his dreams where he would talk to her every night. When I was writing Thanatos that following March, I had a dream that I was in desperate need of something, and I was calling Tib to ask for help. I woke up when a UPS driver rang my doorbell with a box of Tib’s books that his wife had sent me. In the box was a near-impossible to find hardcopy of Corporal Larry Hough’s history of the 13th FOB that turned out essential to the writing of the last canto – make what you will of it.

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