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What's left is footage: the hours before Camille, 1969—hurricane parties, palm trees leaning in the wind, fronds blown back, a woman's hair. Then after: the vacant lots, boats washed ashore, a swamp where graves had been. I recall how we huddled all night in our small house, moving between rooms, emptying pots filled with rain. The next day, our house— on its cinderblocks—seemed to float in the flooded yard: no foundation beneath us, nothing I could see tying us                      to the land. In the water, our reflection trembled, disappeared when I bent to touch it.

Where the old trees reign with their forward dark light stares through a hole in the body’s long house. The bed rolls away from the body, and the body is forced to find a chair. At some hour the body sequesters itself in a shuttered room with no clock. When a clean sheet of paper floats by, the head inclines on its axis. It is one of those common bodies that felt it could not exist without loving, but has in fact gone on and on without love. Like a cave that has stopped growing, we don’t call it dead, but dormant. Now the body is on all fours, one arm engaged in pulling hair from a trap, an activity the body loathes. When the time comes, the body feeds on marinated meats and fruits trained to be luscious. Once the body had ambitions—to be tall and remain soft. No more, but it enjoys rappelling to the water. Because the body’s dwelling is stone, perched over water, we say the body is privileged. Akin to characters in Lawrence books, its livelihood is obscured. It owns a horse named Campaign it mounts on foggy morns. That was the body’s first lie. It has no horse and wouldn’t climb on one. Because the body lives so far from others, it likes reading about checkered lives on the metrópoli. It likes moving around at night under its dress. When it travels, bottles of lotion open in its bags. Early in March the big rains came—washing all good thoughts from the body’s cracks and chinks. By now the body admits it is getting on, and yet, continues to be tormented by things being the way they are. Recently the body took one of the old trees for a wife, but the union has broken down. The light has bored out of the body’s long house. Fog envelops its stone flanks. Still the body enjoys rappelling to the water. And it likes the twenty four-hour stores, walking up and down the aisles, not putting a thing in its basket.

Here we are in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving their pulp to pittance at a gas station in the city that never peeps— and here is the city with its Martians in leather and excoriated thunderbolt- boas, its Bible-trippers, its vintage bazookas for barter not sale, its reluctance to be reluctant, its speed for hire, into which we atrophy ourselves to briefly fit— and we are never so close to the joys of oil, the grease inside which a fat becomes a fit, as we bellow magnanimously praise on the least well of those who pass, ones who are dying we salute: we are coming from the war, they are going to the war—

The irritations of comfort— I visit as they rebuild the house from within: whitening, straightening, bracing the chimney-breast edges and forcing warmth, dryness and windows with views into the cottage below canal-level. For yes, there’s a canal, bringing cold reflections almost to the door, and beyond it the main line to Manchester, its grid of gantries pale against the upland and the sky; there’s a towpath pub, where the red- haired old landlady brings up the beer from the cellar slowly in a jug: there’s a chapel next door to the cottage, set up with a false front and a real boiler-house, and— rest, my mind—nearby there’s a small haulage contractor’s yard. Everything’s turned up here, except a certain complete cast-iron housefront, preserved and pinned to a blank wall in Ottawa. This comfort beckons. It won’t do. It beckons. Driving steadily through rain in a watertight car with the wipers going. It won’t do. It beckons.

It's hard to get anywhere in Utah without going through Provo. I can't tell you the number of times I went there as a teenager, the number Of times I drove into town in the early Afternoon, hungry, and had to look around For a place to eat. You don't have to starve In Provo but you eat at your own risk. At no risk. I would never have gone to Provo On my own. I went accompanied— For reasons almost too trivial—or personal—to mention. There are moments when you simply must get into the car and drive And from Salt Lake there are only a few ways to go, Toward the Great Salt Lake or toward the canyons and to get To Zion or Moab you had to pass through Provo. I remember the population because it went With the number of miles from outskirt to outskirt, 45 miles, 45,000 people, 45 minutes (Keeping to the speed limit) $45 to spend on a suit at a 45% discount... There was nothing Provo's department store did not carry, Including pearl handled Colt 45's, But for a wider selection of fire arms, rifles With narrowing focal points, with greater precision over vast distances, You were better off Next door. O I guess it wasn't that different from entering A thousand other American towns, but this one Made my flesh crawl. I wanted to howl. The men walked with their hands deep in their pockets. The women were afraid to lift their eyes. It was as if something terrible had happened Or was about to happen. I'm not saying you have to love what you do In this life, but it isn't nice to practice The silent treatment on strangers in the desert, Strangers who would have to be wondering Where the other 44,990 people were, since Other than the one drowning potatoes in burning oil Beside the grill in the luncheonette And the one behind the register, And the three grim-faced, parchment-skinned Jack Mormons hunkered over cups, And the handful of impassive faces Placed against the windows Of one-story cinder-block houses, There was no one in Provo beyond the jackrabbits— Glimpsed in abundance en route— Who vanished as we crossed the town line, And drove past the population sign. Or was it a warning in disguise? There was something eerie in the air, An absence I could not identify. An immense single-pump gas station, Shimmering like a mirage in the heat, Took up a good part of the main drag. I pull in. Step into the heat stunned. The car is too hot to touch. I needed gas but didn't want to get it there. It meant digging up the attendant. You know the lights in hospital corridors, Those are the lights in the gas station in Provo. They're the kind of lights that show up whatever's wrong with a face; The kind of lights that make something wrong when there's nothing wrong. When I got there, I was afraid. It's hard To put my finger on the precise reason why. It's not as though something ominous rose From the sidewalks or Hell's Angels cycles Were parked outside the luncheonette. Nothing like that. Nor can I say why, even though there was almost No one on the street, I felt watched. While I slept fitfully in the tilt-back bucket seats, Someone scribbled obscenities on the headlights. I felt drawn by destiny to this nadir. You don't want to provoke anyone in Provo. It's that kind of place, that kind of absence— The desert flattens out, the plants Draw in their antennae. Provo is not where you can hope to find Boon companions. It's against the law To serve liquor in the bar And no one in the luncheonette looks up When you walk in. These are the fallen, Sunk in ashes, adrift In the smoke of unreason. They have masturbated without shame. They have coveted, envied. They have pocketed the tithe. It's hard to put it into words: Provo. It's more like a place without a name, A desert stopover with the semblance of a town. Provo is a place where there is no reason to be. A province that would never grow up to be a suburb, Like the backwaters where they exiled Ovid and Pascal. Only there is no water— Just landscape shorn of green and tawny desert colors. Burned skyline. Hills like craggy impenetrable fortresses. The rain gutters hiss in the dryness. There's a menacing blue tint on the rims Of impinging mountains.

It starts in sadness and bewilderment, The self-reflexive iconography Of late adolescence, and a moment When the world dissolves into a fable Of an alternative geography Beyond the threshold of the visible. And the heart is a kind of mute witness, Abandoning everything for the sake Of an unimaginable goodness Making its way across the crowded stage Of what might have been, leaving in its wake The anxiety of an empty page. Thought abhors a vacuum. Out of it came A partially recognizable shape Stumbling across a wilderness, whose name, Obscure at first, was sooner or later Sure to be revealed, and a landscape Of imaginary rocks and water And the dull pastels of the dimly lit Interior of a gymnasium. Is art the mirror of its opposite, Or is the world itself a mimesis? This afternoon at the symposium Someone tried to resurrect the thesis That a poem is a deflected sigh. And I remembered a day on a beach Thirty-five years ago, in mid-July, The summer before I left for college, With the future hanging just out of reach And constantly receding, like the edge Of the water floating across the sand. Poems are the fruit of the evasions Of a life spent trying to understand The vacuum at the center of the heart, And for all the intricate persuasions They enlist in the service of their art, Are finally small, disappointing things. Yet from them there materializes A way of life, a way of life that brings The fleeting pleasures of a vocation Made up of these constant exercises In what still passes for celebration, That began in a mood of hopelessness On an evening in a dormitory Years and years ago, and seemed to promise A respite from disquietude and care, But that left only the lovely story Of a bright presence hanging in the air.

Veritas sequitur ... In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down— That they are there! Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out.

No one kneads us again out of earth and clay, no one incants our dust. No one. Blessèd art thou, No One. In thy sight would we bloom. In thy spite. A Nothing we were, are now, and ever shall be, blooming: the Nothing-, the No-One's-Rose. With our pistil soul-bright, our stamen heaven-waste, our corona red from the purpleword we sang over, O over the thorn.

Let’s make believe I am happy, I laugh Black poison, all of me Its bottleful, Become sparkling water

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps, with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash, I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You. No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes. No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars. No Lord I know what is within magnified. Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night. Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You. If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins, balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two, it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped watched dimension quarters us into early middle late. Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.