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Note to Reader

Note to the Reader

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Dedication

For Nicole, who gave me the world

Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.

REBECCA SOLNIT, A FIELD GUIDE TO GETTING LOST

The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in the busted end of eaves. I saw the boards sawed the size of broken windowpanes and the fruit trees, stripped. Only the tough wild rhubarb flourished. Goldenrod rubbed up their walls. It was a poor convent. I didn’t see that then, but I know that now. Compared to others it was humble, ragtag, out in the middle of no place. It was the end of the world to some. Where the maps stopped.

LOUISE ERDRICH, LOVE MEDICINE

ONE

ONE

Rocklin

Rocklin

I saw it being built in the bowl

of our foothills, trees disappearing

month after month replaced by smooth roads,

empty schools, chopped-up lots and cul-de-sacs,

unfinished houses, sound berms curving

roads into long cement smiles. We’d

drive there in our parents’ cars — past

starter castles — to daisy-wheel junctions,

stoplights sheathed in muslin,

swinging slowly in summer breeze,

air so tight and piney you could hear

construction hammering miles away.

A ghost town but for that sound. We’d

sit in the unfinished high school stadium, at the

lip of what became the bleachers, a half-built

multiplex in the distance, and listen to nothing

turning into something, waiting for the sky

to go purple, traffic to hush.

Then, curfew looming, we’d race back across

the newly edgeless city, radios cranked

to drown our pounding hearts, tires whining on