This Be the Place

Beneath the inscrutable blue-black mirror of the water’s surface lies this universe in technicolor.

Its whitewashed facade gleamed in the sun, camouflaging the sinister history behind its walls.

I loved the South, but I left it. I think I always planned to. 

Crouching, touching it with my fingertips, a sizzle of electric cold raced through my nervous system. It was, I realized, deadalive. 

The table has been turned into places mundane and profound, bewitching and bedeviling.

The house was perfect, even if it came with a ghost.

If you haven't begged for a kernel of time-earned wisdom while wet and half-naked, you haven’t lived.

It’s as though the bridge does the work of re-enchanting Fayetteville for me.

This pond is inside me: as summer, as stillness, as childhood—as peace.

You’d think that something called “careening” would be able to roll with whatever comes along.

When I stop outside the fringes of the huge canopy, I let the tree know about my presence before making contact by closing my eyes and whispering words—hola, ¿puedo acercarme? hello, can I approach? 

A tractor has as much right to be in a queer poem as a Fire Island reverie.

I closed my eyes and surrendered to the quiet—which was not as quiet as I thought. 

What is the human meaning of a tombstone anyhow? 

I didn’t understand what kind of place Taizé was—but I understood I could stay there for very little money and would be fed three meals a day.

I knew, with absolute certainty, that what I had experienced there was something I would never experience again.

 I often get the impression of living between two courses or two times.

Sometimes the whole duration of place exists in memory all at once.

I think of the importance for the poet of finding a place in which to cultivate reverie, a state which I link to revelations.

Suddenly I got why writers write all those books about the color blue, immersive as a dream.