“On the kind of beautiful spring day where no one expects anything of significance to happen, Henry Gold, a poet who teaches at NYU, fi nishes class and decides to do something he has not done in years: walk a good length of the city to his apartment. Normally he hops on the A train at West Fourth Street and arrives within a few blocks of his house. Today he is feeling inspired, as if he has not seen the sun shining in a while, though that can’t be true, can it? Hasn’t it been a magnificent spring?”