Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. / How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Windy night. Windy morning. Tumbleweeds congregate in my yard like churchgoers who stick with their own kind and bristle at anything unlike them.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.

I walk from one tumbleweed to the next literally sizing them up. I want a fat one, nice and round, no thorns. I find one I like and carry it high like a torch to my back door. I imagine I’m carrying justice or truth, though it’s just a dead amaranth and I’m just a person living in Toquerville, Utah, trying to make sense of this place before I leave it.

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.

This is not a city, I think. Not in any real sense. Eighteen hundred people live in this town named after a Paiute Chief who may not have existed. He makes a nice story, though, one of Native Americans and Mormon pioneers living in harmony, so the locals are sticking to it. There are probably as many cows and chickens as humans here. Six cloned while bulls live up on the hill. Two Shetland ponies reside down the street. More than anything, this place is comprised of sandy soils, so many types they each have a name — alfisols, aridsols, entisols, mollisols — not like the basalt, which is just called basalt. Chief Toquer was named after that basalt, so the story goes.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city.

The tumbleweed will stay on my coffee table until I get on the road to Tucson, where I’ll display it as a reminder of the place I’ve left. Well, mostly left. We never leave the places we leave. Didn’t Cavafy say as much in his poem “The City”?

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

But I have hope. Those of us who despair must also hope. It’s like a teeter-totter, but with great effort you can sit closer to the fulcrum and find balance. Hope isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a tumbleweed trying to spread its seeds as far as possible even after it’s dead. I have that kind of hope, one that moves with me and urges me to move. Movement is breath, is heartbeat. I especially love those slabs of highway that make the car go “ga-dung, ga-dung, ga-dung” the way my heart does when I know I’m alive. The roads between here and Tucson undulate like a roller coaster meant for children. They make me nauseated, which is another way of knowing I’m alive, an old way of knowing, a way I may cast off one day as I tumble along.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Then I might as well go anywhere I want, Cavafy. Why relegate myself to this small corner? Why do here what I could do in wilder lands with deeper histories? Where admission is possible and millions of saguaros throw up their arms to welcome the beloved wrecked and wretched with perfect equanimity.

—

The text in italics is from “The City,” by C P. Cavafy.