So this is the way I have to tell it: it happened on an ocean, short and laminate, and through remembering I will start to say it the right way. You were sure it was an ocean. Almost guaranteed. You told me so. (Another oceanlike thing you would swim in. And on the shoreside greeting all the same, erstwhile spanishmen or frenchmen at their tasks now composing an ossuary little seashell kingdom of their ground up parts in the lake lapping indifferent, in your pose looking to it amazed the water can clump itself so, form a sheet, bakelite nation, brittle ocean of the foundry.) The people were stupid and had to be taught how to make their fragile peace; they were given the cup (erstwhile gourd) and the hand, which pounded railroads out of its own hard pneumatic self. What's left of this imitation? this immediate appeal to the waves? their bricks of fluid?—in whose foundry was this made? can you take it and plunge? deep enough for effect? even if it were awfully cold? do you ever look out here from your car in the harsh midst of certain feelings? right accoutrement and soundtrack? do certain smells initiate recall? Still, this place is good for now. There is a store where I can buy various foods. The bricks are still a lake of ocean. The problem is that I cannot distinguish it from the other places. Even whales swim across the sidings of various buildings. I thought grim thoughts on the airplane, but with the lake view this is quite nice. The sky is more iron than the rest of the place, and I get sudden urges to do things I would never do otherwise. The me says: feel this betrayal. This cold hand. Try to say who diminishes first from this perspective: the you or the lake? I would rather it be the other way. Burn pits and lakes are the same thing. So I call it the lake of ice as a fabulation. I insist that I see divinity at work in the sloughing wet fields and the sad birds over the salt lakes as brine flies all scurry shy from their pans. (Wrong.) So there's a story here. Some miles away, a dopesick eyeball looks over its roost of earth and sees a small town amid the heated waters. Blue Angels country, aye, Nevada marked in dotted lines. There is no vibration for miles. There is only the highway bisecting the country and teething its capillary streets. Yes, trailblazers and forerunners went for a long time down the road and created business and shops like foodplaces, sexplaces, sleepplaces for miners to sit themselves down after god awful long days in those long shafts with very helpful Paiute indians, Basque women, etcetera (there is a mural dedicated to this), and the kilns fired every day. This will be all they remember! That and some godawful stripes of forest lining the khaki valley floors. Call it White Pine. My story-man worked in a constabulary force. Keeping order. Yes, that was a good thing. The woman he loved worked the desk near him. But the main guy—he was his boss and hers—did bad things. It was a bad look for White Pine County. He got drunk and asked to fuck her at every opportunity. He gave his deputy a hard time for minding it. But there was a design beneath the sheriff's surface terrorism, like a simpler innocent bad. This sheriff forced strange things to happen. Ely was a good town. How many places are raised in evil and vice and retain an awareness of all the things they did the night before? Ely does, the deputy thought, and he could raise his hand upon his arm and create a pointer to the evidence in empty houses, how the lights in Ely always cut out the moment he drove away into the quiet night. Dark as juniper. And how could there be nothing of electric lit comfort so quickly? How could it be? That man touching his wife like he owned the half of town and all of White Pine County, near stretching his arms from the kilns across the snake range out to Baker. Today, we do much the same thing. I stand and squint my fingers so as to make the lake, the you, smaller. Der Wundenmann: crushed underpalm as it walks. This city is like the man. I make it so when I sit at the edge of town. "So please stop doing that and touching my wife and forcing deputies to shoot their guns." He told sheriff at that party that he'd be here all night if he had to. But on this eastern lakeshore (world apart from Nevada I know) I am reminded that it's a burlesque standing in for all other lakeshores, cheap lake, looking from my hotel. I spent my own nights in Ely, glazed laying; my mind was cracked and lacquered. I partook in certain things. This lake is the shore, and this building is the seed. We are building the seed again. We cannot try the small first things first.