If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that?

Matthew 5:46

It was a year of brilliant water in Pennsylvania that final summer seven years ago, the sun's quick reprints in my attache case: those students of mist have drenched me with dew, I'm driving away from that widow's house, my eyes open to a dream of drowning. But even when I pass --in Ohio-- the one exit to Calcutta, I don't know I've begun mapping America, the city limits of Evanescence now everywhere. It was a year of brilliant water, Phil, such a cadence of dead seas at each turn: so much refused to breathe in those painted reflections, trapped there in ripples of hills: a woman climbed the steps to Acoma, vanished into the sky. In the ghost towns of Arizona, there were charcoal tribes with desert voices, among their faces always the last speaker of a language. And there was always thirst: a train taking me from Bisbee, that copper landscape with bones, into a twilight with no water. Phil, I never told you where I'd been these years, swearing fidelity to anyone. Now there's only regret: I didn't send you my routes of Evanescence. You never wrote.