I had plundered past nervous. A tense Walmart truck clanging the interstate. Smoke gnawing the face of some mountain. America, aromaticwith ravages. In schism. Sacrificed. I stayedwoke most nights near the door. Occupied with every handle. Four yearsmy father had gone from corridor to quiver and I mustered my saddleto get to him often. Four years of crinkled conversing.Yes, and ginger. I shivered through roomsof my home in the desert with its stoic astonishmentsand took on some needles. I couldn’t settle the ache.The curt country and my family. Every ache size, every shape.To reset, I’ve come to the distance, to watch the ocean repeathow to unfinish. I brought with me a light jacket and a thick bookabout Agnes Martin. I’m not surewhy I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artistand her simple lines against excess. Know she madesacred an emptiness. Maybe I’ll hear thin strands of refugeapart from the chaos that circles. What I wantis nothing. No meaning, no matter, no more. I’ve run awaywith the most fragile questions. Haggardin a small room big enough for a bedwith its modest blanket. I let my watch doze on the sill.Minor details hurtle over grasses. A windribbed fence.The land around me tugs. I don’t know it. Fog covers.Blank space consumes me.I figure every day I’ll navigate to the tail end of this small townwith its translucent leavings. What I want to figure outis what could be in the neithers. I am enteringa conversation with Agnes for no reason I yet understand. I am not lookingto rivet to her, but to be extractedfrom the sharp cuff of politics, of dementia-tweaked presence, of the gravityof a future that keeps rolling toward me. How do you recoverfrom a decisive wound? A line, a line: it never leaves you.