I remember what was there before the city grew into its own new kind of wilderness: hills fenced in, mossy trails blueprinted, trees felled into footnotes like everything else in what we as schoolchildren were told was history. We practiced chainsaw loops and strokes on paper, learned how subtraction shadows sums; intoned prayers while balancing on scabbed knees. When it rained, the water rose up and up around our houses' hems as if a sea were waiting beneath the apron-sized gardens planted by our mothers. If we left, still we'd return as soon as the sun restored a flimsy crust to soaked surfaces. Even the horses knew not to stamp their feet. We learned to tell one sound of water from another: kettle-boil, hand pump installment, frost- crackle upon the cabbage heads. And that old, unslaked thirst rising out of the ground year after year, trying to take it all back.