I couldn’t write about Oregon because California was still a silty memory, unpurged, mediated, transomed by the bar window, the smoke and hair, the red fingernails making sense backwards, making 1994.

I couldn’t write about what I still possessed & what I didn’t possess but what was the vessel containing me & those who passed through me, used, sometimes willingly, sometimes despite themselves, sometimes carrying a riding crop, sometimes a comb.

I couldn’t write Seattle in my child’s script, couldn’t write Mississippi, home of Peavey Amplifiers, couldn’t write Florida, couldn’t write Fresno, all cotton & horseshit & Mexican dope, couldn’t make love to a ghost.

I started out writing the coastline, then the herons, then the nutria, then the small soft children, disappearing into daycare, as fragile as baby ducks. I wrote baby ducks, the Canadian geese, the Philip Sidney & Beatrice.

I started writing on Beatrice, on her body, on her pale thighs, her tattooed ankle, her smart angles, her lips tobacco-stained & pallid in the February night. Her lips like her tee-shirt, like her foot on my knee.

I started writing on new metals & plastics; on the uses of polyhedral solids; on risk and Risk! the boardgame; on the difference between “and” and “&.” I gave myself back to the twenty-fourth year & tried to find there news of my early demise.

I couldn’t write “dearly” or “framework” or “flouted” or “pock-marked” or “Jane” or “vacillate” or “frantic” or “Bozeman, MT” or “cancer-addled” or “snakes circular like August” or “bubblegum” or “daiquiri.”

I couldn’t write the queer day clearly because my thoughts were with Beatrice and her nudity and with Jane and her tightly-buttoned jeans & with the man I kissed in the bar under duress but really enjoyed. This is not clarity in the traditional sense.

I couldn’t write San Diego as a more specific version of California. The Coronado Bridge with its intimations of white sands and December shakes. I couldn’t write the canyon, nor could I write the mouth. I almost wrote the freeway, the quiet toxic miles.

I wrote on both sides of the paper more frequently as my life unwrinkled. I began to approach revision as jailable offense. Windows became smaller, steam heat, necessary. My extremities atrophied as the wind did its work.

I cannot write about Oregon because it is not a home to so many. To so many gone and so many still circulating, the pleasures are few. There is a candle and a claw, a small leather book with all thirteen names, written upside down as if in a concave surface.