Diego Delso, "Geysers of Tatio, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile," 2016
My footprints have been swept clean away by the wind. Do I know where I am? Yes, I know. I am here. I am lost. And the sun is high in its arc, its shadows cast black as pips on white dice, the dice I tossed when I set forth, Audaces fortuna iuvat. Mouth as dry as the scree on this downslope. I wonder, now, if Virgil made a bleak joke in giving those words to a man who loses and dies. We all die. In dying, lose touch. The talus slope underfoot shifts, slides— and I lose touch with where, how I began.