The Place

After years of going back to a place you love,
you may have so many memories of the place
that whenever you think about it you become
calm and still as the lake at evening
when the hills and trees are mirrored there.

You can imagine your way back any time,
following trails you know by heart, with arteries
of roots, and you hold onto the place inside
the way the tentacled roots of a birch
grip a granite boulder shagged with ferns.
But there is always something calling you back
further, to childhood summers spent there,
or even further, beyond specific memories,
until memory itself, in its purest form,
is made of blue lakes nestled into foothills
and rivers the color of ale plunging over
rust-orange rocks then deepening for long still stretches
where pines and hemlocks lean out over the bank,
as you lean too, thinking, wherever you are.
And when you think of actually going back,
you can already feel how that place in you
will go rushing out to meet the real place,
which, itself, will lie before you, more vivid
than you remembered it, or more vivid because
you remembered it, each layer of your memory
adding a bluer gloss to the lake's surface
and polishing the leaves until they shine.

~ Jeffrey Harrison