I know the place where the world falls away, where the pavement
is cracked and jagged and the green ocean stretches so far into
the distance that we, long ago, stopped wondering where it ends.
I have wandered concrete corridors so vast & cavernous that even
gestures echo, that a turn of a hand reverberates with intricate
implications as tangled as the poppies which grow wild on
the eleventh floor. And the twelfth. And the forty-third.
I know where the crowds gather, raucous & shrewd, beneath
whirling lights & happy hollering to pick through
the leftover and leftbehind, second-hand vestiges
of a thousand other lives abandoned and scavenged,
trinkets bought for their faraway & familiar itch.
I know how the sunlight turns rosegold on the lake
beside the barn behind the brick lane with all its patios
spilling intimately into each other with the promise of a
party no one ever attends, all the neat, narrow houses
put together like puzzles and kept unsettlingly empty.
I know where they show vague arthouse films all hours
of the night free of charge, where nobody watches the screen,
always there to think, there to run into someone they forgot
decades ago, to find a scar where that connection was
even if they can't remember now why it mattered then.
I see the sky more when I visit now, orange and pink,
indigo and silver, the air sweet with sea-salt, with
riesling, with conversations we could have if only I
could sit still, in the moment--but the broad arches
call to me, the stone steps leading somewhere
I don't yet know.