And maybe it’s meant to be blurry, maybe the background is more important than the sharp outline of the wolf that emerges, gradually, as the lens is turned. The dark lush foliage, the sweet soprano sound of the northern lights, the low notes of foghorns on the bay, the way the artist laid a narrow strip of white to make Jenny Lind’s ribbon look like satin, the ivory fur of the harp seal babies, the rush of salmon leaping upstream to their deaths, the kamikaze pilots plummeting to theirs, the icy sky at night over Neil Young’s Canada, Pocahontas and the smoke of muskets and the sound of grenades muffled by the embrace of arms, the squirrels receiving a bullet or a peanut, the chipmunk fighting the mourning dove, the faces of the men on the boats as a wave fell and they caught their first glimpse of Normandy’s sand, a woman in a lace-collared dress in 1932, rucking up her skirt and taking a running start for the long jump, the way we all must do as writers, following our own legs as they stride across thin air to deliver us with a soft thud on a pile of sand somewhere.

Here, and now.

Festival Days

In the festival’s terror

The village

Has become impoverished, indifferent

Like trees in fall.

On women’s shoulders

Naked boys sit,

A little shy,

Hiding their members in their thighs

—Nand Chaturvedi, “The Cruel Festival Time,”
translated by Katherine Russell Rich and
Vidhu Shekhar Chaturvedi

The fever-dream primary colors of this Arizona rental, purple and green and blue and red, and the American Indian rugs and Moroccan rugs and the determined ceramic tchotchkes glaring from every surface. I thought it was nightmarish at first and it reminded me of something but not until this morning sitting on the bed did I realize that it reminds me of the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Staying there in India, with Kathy. How kind our driver was to her, ferrying us across the countryside and so carefully attending to her needs while Emma and I were basically green from dogs-getting-hit-by-cars phobia and hunger. Although Emma had thrown in the towel instantly on hunger and was glimpsed grabbing fruit (fruit!) and other inadvisables off the very first hotel’s buffet table, and when I tried to stop her, she snarled, “I have to eat these,” which startled us both into laughter and then of course she and Kathy, who ate everything because she was throwing up all the time anyway, got massively sick and I lay in my quiet elaborate bed with nets and gold tassels reading Jonathan Franzen on an e-reader and listened to them puking up goat guts and watery yogurt in stereo.