There wasn’t any story in the papers; I heard about “the Vision,” as everyone called it, from my students. I’d come to Salt Lake to teach at the University of Utah, and it was late in the semester, in May, when some of the graduate poets told us the story, and that they’d been to see the vision at the corner of First and Seventh. Paul and I drove there as soon as we could.

It was easy to find. The holy tree was right beside the sidewalk, and the police had cordoned off a portion of the street with wooden barriers, to allow the crowd at park’s edge to spill over the curb and onto the asphalt. A line of people coiled along the walk, waiting their turn to climb a portable metal ladder wheeled into place beside the trunk, which was entirely encrusted with rosaries and paper flowers and milagros, and dozens of photographs: snapshots of parents who’d died, of soldiers, of sick children, pictures of babies with handwritten prayers penned on folded pieces of paper tacked beside them. The tree seemed dressed, wrapped in glory and supplication.

I loved watching the people in line: homeboys in big jackets and oversize jeans, couples with children in their arms and in strollers, little kids by themselves, teenage girls with elaborately heaped and sprayed hair. Two viejas with megaphones sat beside the trunk in folding chairs; maestras, they kept watch, shepherded the pilgrims up and down the ladder, and led the rosary, even while they offered instruction or kept everyone in line, their prayer somehow uninterrupted: Hail Mary, in Spanish, again and again, a dry soft drone which became that evening’s music.

It was nearly dark, and shadowy around the edges of the park, where more people gathered, ate ice creams, and talked softly or watched the people coming and going, but every face near the tree was lit by the glow of a huge bank of candles beneath the trunk, the wavering glow of each individual flame made steady by the great number of them. The light cast by the sum of all those votives, in their clear or blue glass holders, their red jars engraved with images of Guadalupe, was steady and warm.