The Far West

The city and the continent trail off into cold black water the same way: at the western edge, a flat stretch with precipitous planes set perpendicular and back from the beach or beach-equivalent, a blacktop margin where the drugged and dying trudge, queue up for Hades. Bolinas had its junkie lady with gray skin, gray sweater, stumbling through the sand with the short- burst intensity and long-run aimlessness of crackhead hustlers on the West Street piers. Dreams of Bolinas haunted me for years before I saw it. I’d huddle at the foot of the cliff in a cold wind late at night, wrapped in Indian blankets, waiting with strangers as the tidal wave or temblor hit. Tonight I walk with old friends in a new dream past a vest-pocket park of great formality and charm in the far West Village. My disaffected former confidant has grown a pony tail and cruises up the street on a “hog,” a “chopper,” which seems a perfect locomotive choice. I walk out to the quay where gondola after enormous gondola departs for “the other side,” not New Jersey anymore, anymore than something prosaic as another mass of land past the bright horizon could function as a mirror of the chopped-away Bolinas hill. O western edge, where points of interest on maps of individual hearts and bodies disappear in waters of a depth unfathomable even in a dream, I had thought that sleep was meant to blunt your sharpness, not to hone and polish with the lapping of the hungry waves of Lethe.