dreamtime

El Colonel smiles. Neatly refolding a fresh newspaper along its crisp pleats, he places it on top of a precisely aligned stack to his left. Turning slightly to his right, he lifts and efficiently opens another briskly crackling journal from the morning mail. Every few days, in one or another language, at varying lengths in differing fonts under tersely worded headers and with now more, now less details, there are appearing enigmatic reports of a series of American poets gone missing. From the library of a bucolic small college, from a hotel lobby in a great city, from the bathroom at a conference, from sidewalk cafes and sumptuous banquets, from illicit rendezvous' and quiet nights in offices, now here, now there, American poets "minor" and "major" are vanishing without a trace.