Some places settle into your self, like loam, or pages from an unfinishable book. Galway, Leitrim, the Burren, Oakland, Berkeley. Dig on and on, and you’ll find more cities, bookshops, bars, and crannies, the ravines and mesas of San Diego, mom’s donut shop, rooms where old women cackle in Khmer and bet and drink cognac, the library where language first led you astray. At the deepest level, battered by the santa ana wind that apparently compels decent men to dream of murder, there’s a little house: a cosmos of small rooms, or chrysalises, haunted by a stray cat seduced with pre-sliced cheese. In the yard, a great tree looms, casting deep shade, before it was cut down, before you ever knew the word “loss”. It’s stalwart and unbending; I can still recall the wind’s rattle in its boughs.





<<