Oh, New Orleans.

I just don't know what to say. I felt my stomach sink today as I watched the news and saw the city awash in fetid water. It broke my heart.

What beautiful memories have now been completely carried away and erased by a storm?

I can't help but think again of the Pacheco poem for which this blog is named.

"only the wind is your shelter.
And the wind, as you well know,
is a boundless vacancy,
the sound the world makes
when a moment dies."

I obsess so often on time's erosion of time. It eats away at itself, erasing itself from space and from memory. There are no walls to contain it. No spaces to hold it.

And I continue to imagine moments when I will pass memories on the street - pass the fat old woman in feathers and velvet crooning and banging on a beat-up keyboard - pass that wizened bearded man with the umbrella hat preaching the end of the world - pass that old clapboard house with "Let Love Rule" blocked along the side - pass so many backgrounds that were backgrounds of other times. At those moments, I stand and see myself with longer hair, wider eyes, smoother brow, brighter duds, laughing or frowning, falling in love or thinking of excuses to skip work. And now, through the passage of one storm, I may have lost the streets where memories would have met me, and I wonder if they'll be able to find me without the signposts.