"California."
"We often ate late by flameless candles
and took turns choosing how best to be disposed of.
I want to be buried.
I want everyone to be buried.
I realized there's scarcely a spare acre left in the ground,
but I just can't do without the indecorous transit from parlor
to plot.
I need that array of daytime headlights
jolting the arid access road, the only remembrance that
matters.
Don't make a speech.
For years I would wonder whether the man who attacked me--
in his memory, did the event of it
persist as a dull sort of flash?
And then he died and became himself just a flash
in the mind of the world.
And now I wonder, is he anywhere?
I don't believe in hell.
And also I don't believe in nothing.
So that leaves only heaven.
I have a couple questions.
It is my understanding that the weather in heaven
has only a single setting, which is pleasant.
I haven't spent real time in California,
but friends of mine who've moved there
say it's challenging, absent the changing of the seasons,
to remember when things took place.
With reference to always the lodgepole pine
and the low-bent needlegrass, you get confused.
Dates and sequences, even the people involved.
You can almost imagine the whole thing with somebody else."