Even better yet, it’s a mistake. New Harmony
Is a community of a couple hundred souls,
Twenty kilometers or so due west. For a route
With roads, it's maybe forty, forty-five minutes
Up and around from Virgin by car, on the far side
Of the interstate, edge of Pine Valley Wilderness.
The old Harmony was Fort Harmony, washed out
When its adobe walls melted in the Great Flood
Of 1862. So there. The software triangulates
To the nearest municipality in a straight line,
And at some point in the middle of these cliffs
Without any town or village near, it flips
From labeling this Virgin to stating New Harmony,
Although here’s well outside the bounds of either.
It’s odd, perhaps, that the mapping engineers
Chose to configure the software’s program
To assign town names to current locations that way,
But it’s not wholly their fault and not at all
The fault of the software. Blame the nature
Of names. New Harmony’s boundaries are
Arbitrary as any noun’s, any label’s, and it is not
Only difference that distinguishes difference,
Not only that New Harmony cannot be Virgin,
But that there are vast expanses of experience
To which no names apply, neither Fort nor New
Nor Virgin nor Harmony nor Zion nor the difference
Between any of them, but necessarily outside.
I’ve driven past the actual speck of New Harmony
Maybe a hundred times. Never saw the exit sign.
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