Two hours on that road, and we saw no one but jackrabbits,
those innocents of plane and direction who seemed compelled
from the middle distance, magnetized to the undercarriage.
All creatures are plagued by dangerous ambiguities

that inhabit the visual realm. If approached from the east,
an old community hall at an unmarked intersection
will summon its will and say CRANDALL. From the field where
that village stood, a farmer on his mid-century Case

waved to the car as if from one of the four corners
of the known world. The first gift of any being
is that it exists. Born 50 years after Newton's death,
Carl Gauss was familiar with the angular

defect. He lived on its outsized surfaces. His beloved died
in childbirth with their newborn son, and soon after a bereft
daughter followed. Staring through his theorems, through
fearsome curves of elliptical space, he saw only the back

of his head. Random errors like a bell around a mean.
Believe me, my dear friend, he wrote, tragedy has woven itself
through my life like a red ribbon. He wrote:
Even the bright sky makes me sadder. All work is secret,

all times unreasonable. To love is to consent to distance.
I went back, to the dirt track through the Ravenscrag
Formation, its rose striations in cuts and erosions,
greasewood, sage and cactus prevailing on the upslope,

willow, cottonwood close to water, long bonebeds
of the Cretaceous and Paleocene, graves we worship
by digging at. I walked the margins of the Williston Basin
without knowing it; over sandstones, shale, muddy siltstone,

claystones, lateral sheets of braided river gravels, near lost
on the lignite alluvial plain within sight of uranium deposits
JNR Corp. has its eye on, and probably trespassing. Some people
are outfitted with odd and foolish habits. An unregulated

look. Has the devil any servant on earth so perfect
as the stranger? Who hears, always, dice thrown
on the outskirts, and whose cause is yet to be proven?
Things aren't meant to happen, yet they happen

nonetheless. I stayed in that country, travelled until dark
the first night of the Perseids while cloud massed
to the discernible horizon, and read it as a sign,
though it was no sign. Your leaving opened up a view

like that from the cliffs in their coarse conglomerate
sequence, out to where lines, the great circles, intersect.
Where symmetries radiate from a first principle and all opposites
are contained, no one thing taking precedence. That day,

the smell of rained-on grasses was narcotic, rising
from the ground in a mineral swarm. It was added to us,
our fire visible for miles, as late afternoon bent
to the rangeland and laid its shining weapons down.