Cowboy

I’ve read what I wanted to in the papers and drifted into an old Paris Review interview with Susan Sontag. Cowboy, whose cancer has spread, is sleeping below me. I hope he is dreaming of rabbits.

I woke up thinking of a stretch of Highway 395 in California, running up the Owens Valley between the Sierra Nevada and the White Mountains, a ribbon of road on brown earth under blue sky. I once worked there, from Round Valley down to Lone Pine. I remembered how hard it was to leave it …