It was late in May of ’87 that we embarked on grand explorations that would forever crack our world and thrust us through that fault into living on the other side which, of course, turned out to be nothing more than the undressed version of a reality we had been moving through all along.

I was going for seventeen days to Rome and Florence, the final trip of making after working ten years on an epic poem called Fire Without Witness. Ironically, though I’d tried to go for years, I was only able to go when the book was finished. I asked Robert to join me, but he balked and wound up fishing for a week in Canada with all his high school drinking buddies. Neither of us could know we were saturating our addictive selves with adventures that would change everything and which we had to undertake alone.

Robert entered a nothingness darker than he’d ever known, sitting in a fishing shack in the woods, drinking whatever was handy, eating nothing, dreaming nothing, hating nothing; while I began to surface in the ruins of the Roman Forum as if waking from a ten-year binge of making. On his way home, driving the thruway, Robert lost feeling in his hands and feet. It was the beginning of neuropathy, nerve damage that affects the extremities of long-term alcoholics. As he drove the highway, feeling draining from his limbs, I was sitting on the Spanish Steps in Rome, a lump forming on my head that I was unaware of, while, also unknown to me, my former wife was being diagnosed across the Atlantic with cervical cancer.

When I returned, Ann and I tumbled into a gauntlet of crisis that lasted three years in which we both underwent surgeries for cancer. I have written extensively about this period. It is the canyon through which this book like a river flows. But what hasn’t been brought to light is the path Robert and I shared along the way; the evolution of that grip forged in fire.

As Ann and I went through months of diagnosis and testing, discovering we had cancer at the same time, Robert was going through intensive detox, getting sober to his core. We were all naked, raw, fighting for our lives, and the costume of art became cumbersome and weighty.