Louisiana Purchase

Who knows but that Meriwether Lewis’s lost diaries might turn up yet packed in a can in some cramped ex-midden dug up a thousand years from now, that elegant, exfoliate style continue on up the Missouri, into sadness and disrepute, the suicide in a hotel in Tennessee no more important now than the bundle of grasses my friend made out in the woods yesterday and gave to me after a meeting in which she confessed she’s afraid of everything that’s coming. The past I don’t mind, she said, and laughed as if that was something.