So the roof, and my beer and her wine and talking and the scribble and the train that you could almost hear moving along the tracks, the way they do, the wheels on the rails, and the rocking sound. And in the mid-distance, the sprawl of Tucson and the interstate, the concrete connection Emmylou Harris sang about in a song I’ll never be able to listen to again. How when she says the word interstate and her voice throbs, you realize that she can bring her emotions to anything, even something as bland, unchanging, and featureless as an interstate highway. Everything heightened, and her touring with Gram Parsons all those lifetimes ago, him killing himself on drugs and music while she had to stand there watching him disintegrate, dropping, as Tony Hoagland would say, through the layers of her care, down and down until she ended up alone on the edge of a canyon—this is from another song—watching it burn. A canyon, the washes where it feels like walking on a beach only without the water, any water, no water, and the cactus flowers everywhere, the scalloped petals, waiting all year to bloom just as Mary and I get off our plane and drive down the bland blond Arizona interstate to take them in, along with the rest of it, the morning when I woke so early and tiptoed to the kitchen for tea and looked out the window and there he was, scabby boy, tall and rangy, trotting purposefully from some harrowing night errand, like Gram Parsons at the end of a bout of drinking, heading home without his guitar or his shoes, staggering drunk…the coyote as a doomed country singer, or as the embodiment of loss, trotting through the dawn light, looking both guilty and defiant. Whatever he had done was already in his past, in his stomach, and he was just looking for a cool spot to sleep it off. The rattlesnake under the rock, the coyote stretched out beneath a friendly ledge, the sun a burning ball punishing everything for the sake of punishing. M. underfoot, the big blue arch of sky overhead, and the darkness falling in streaks of pink, while Mary and I drink.

The weird jewel-embedded Arizona wall, the jewels embedded in the elegant rani’s necklace, her stark collarbones, her perfectly draped sari. The Arizona-Indian house with its scorpions and the India-Indian hunting lodge with its incredible accoutrements—the tiny bright birds flitting through the open-air living room, the telephones on each bedside table with a foot of cord dangling free, no jacks anywhere, the empty umbrella stand made from the foot and leg of an elephant, its leather eerily supple and lifelike. The down-at-heel Exotic Marigold with its own raja sitting in a lawn chair in a weedy field, keeping an eye on a worker, a young guy who was lunging the horse ineptly. Emma the horsewoman cringing and finally bursting out, “You’re doing it wrong!” as the horse, big and black, shapely and beautiful, huffed and staggered, the lunge line too loose, its pace too slow. The long whip licking its back delicately every few strides. “They can get hurt doing it like that!”