Berkeley, CA

I am still here. Rather am here again after weeklong travels east. You dabble in the past at your own risk, eh? You move your feet on the old roads and strange thing your thoughts begin to take old streets too. You are a creature of weather and geography. The snow and closely wrapped skies, the circular and radial streets shifted by the cataclysms of days now extant only in artifacts of mouldering warehouses and unused railway lines. Somerville, Cambridge, Boston: light old english names, easy on the tongue and mind. How unlike them, even still, to name their cities after eternal verities and the bones of the elect: Saint Francis, The Angels, Sacrament.

Yet I am still here, I came back. The glowering blue sky is back over my head, I am weighted down by the usual mumbo-jumbo of vision and electric fields, excitation, inhibition. How does anyone live in the eternal kindness of Saint Francis? What congress with a man wounded by God? This city is not inimical to any of the ordinary pursuits, nor to liberty. Rather to possession, and the sublimest possession, fear.

Why did I ever leave? There were so many times at the gate when I could have turned back. I would long to consider this absense the dark night of a mythic journey, a quest to bring back some metaphysical rose—what I have found here is not altogether worth losing again—but I can no longer remember where I set out from, or, though I remember each departure in too much detail, whether I set out from anywhere at all.

 Rats, muttered incomplete
 Running the circuit of fields
 Bid the rising and turning
 Of the cold gray
 The huddled corners,
 What yields gnawing
 Last year's grain