I must work today all day. I am powerfully sleepy although I slept soundly for eight hours. Night full of dreams. Excavating And the dream before that? And the one before that? backward into the darkness of forgetting.

I was thinking just now of Burning Man and how the traffic it generates keeps this county alive, passers-through glutting the stations and shops with careless money.

And had the memory of twelve years ago when I drove home with brother Brian from my mother's, our mother's, death in Arizona. I'd waited on her dying at the Copper Queen Hospital, and then seen to her cremation, emptied and cleaned her little rented house in Bisbee, and now I drove the rented minivan packed with what I'd kept, plus brother and two large dogs and the fiberboard box of Mother's ashes, coming into California the back way via the Gerlach highway in Nevada. It was the Sunday night before Labor Day, 11 p.m., and the revelers were pouring out onto the interstate north of Reno from the road to Burning Man in one uninterrupted south-flowing stream of headlights 100 miles from the Black Rock Desert and ours the only vehicle going north. And at Gerlach itself all the vehicles in a clot we penetrated with difficulty nearly bashed by drunken driver swinging into our lane at us. Close call. Burst of adrenalin.

And finally the dark beyond--the wilderness obtained--like pitch, the road bending out of the flat, between low hills crowding the tarmac on either side tight and winding and black, and bottoming from a little rise whoa! slamming on brakes and sliding into a herd of black black cattle standing motionless and asleep on the road. Recovering--more adrenalin--then inching our way among them and finally past. So tired, driving since Las Vegas or maybe Kingman that morning. It was after 1 a.m. and we had to make it home. And finally passing into California on the secret back road and up the unlit valley through the tiny sleeping towns Eagleville and Cedarville, and at our intersection brother B, riding along silent with me the whole time and from half-sleep cries out "We're home!" recognizing the turn. Impressed me. So much more to him than I'll ever know.

And two miles more. And we fall into our little dark house and the orchard around it with its long grass. Fall into our beds so happy from tidying up our mother's death, so grateful to arrive we'd almost forgotten it.

***

Proverb
by Kenneth Koch

Les morts vont vite, the dead go fast, the next day absent!
Et les vivants sont dingues, the living are haywire.
Except for a few who grieve, life rapidly readjusts itself
The milliner trims the hat not thinking of the departed
The horse sweats and throws his stubborn rider to the earth
Uncaring if he has killed him or not
The thrown man rises. But now he knows that he is not going,
Not going fast, though he was close to having been gone.
The day after Caesar’s death, there was a new, bustling Rome
The moment after the racehorse’s death, a new one is sought for the stable
The second after a moth’s death there are one or two hundred other moths
The month after Einstein’s death the earth is inundated with new theories
Biographies are written to cover up the speed with which we go:
No more presence in the bedroom or waiting in the hall
Greeting to say hello with mixed emotions. The dead go quickly
Not knowing why they go or where they go. To die is human,
To come back divine. Roosevelt gives way to Truman
Suddenly in the empty White House a brave new voice resounds
And the wheelchaired captain has crossed the great divide.
Faster than memories, faster than old mythologies, faster than the speediest train.
Alexander of Macedon, on time!
Prudhomme on time, Gorbachev on time, the beloved and the lover on time!
Les morts vont vite. We living stand at the gate
And life goes on.



August 15, 2002