THE FURNACE SHUTTING OFF SOUNDS LIKE A WAVE RUSHING under itself as it draws back into the ocean. That sound, which leads to its own absence, woke me up before the alarm went off. Spring morning, window a crack open, gray-blue light limning the horizon that isn’t, after all, so far away. Dreams about the weather. Drops of rain like pearls on rose leaves, last year’s old buds withered, like burnt-out suns above them, unable to evaporate the dew. Then the silence in the house wasn’t silence anymore: wood’s small cracks and creaks, the sound from the first floor as of a squeaky hinge. Then the alarm’s click before the radio’s voice kicks on. A poet, the reporter reports, studying volcanoes for a new book, disappeared on a small island in Japan. He left the island’s only inn early in the morning, a day-pack and a walking stick his only equipment. The volcano wasn’t large, though it is active. Police found his footprints at the trailhead, but soon lost them in the heavy forest. The path leads to the crater, where noxious fumes leak out of the mouth. Investigators are certain the poet did not fall into the volcano. There is no explanation for their certainty. A steeper path on the mountain’s back has yet to be explored. Night came on before the searchers could conclude their search. The steep path leads from the edge of the bed, down the stairs, to the study where the same pages wait, some full of words, some empty. The story has lost its order, the story I am writing, this story of my life. Emerson thought the mind’s nature was volcanic; my father was the first person to tell me this. A rock falls into the eye and becomes molten in the mind and memory cools it back into the rock first seen. It alters when it reemerges, but one cannot tell the difference. It looks the same, but we are imagining it. Memory is igneous more than ingenious, igneous, and like granite, intrusive, heaved up within oneself, the whole range of one’s life, mountains’ forbidding height looming over the plains where one lives, mountains formed by the life already lived, but toward which one is always walking, one’s own past ahead of him, seeking the improbable path already forged, this path back through oneself, this path we call the present tense, which becomes the continental divide when the tense shifts and the path is lost, path from which the walker emerges only to turn around and see the peaks pulled up by his feet, and the snowy pass, and alpine heights, where those stranded sometime must feed on themselves to survive, where sometimes, through the icy crust, the crocus blooms. White hills of pages, there you are—on the flat desk. And only when I sit down do I notice a black beetle upside down, rowing his legs against the air. Then I knew the poet fell into the volcano’s crater, despite the investigator’s assurance. There is nowhere else to fall.