Places and Friends and Time

I've been woolgathering a lot lately, especially about old friends, old times and old places. Funny how these things will always stay with me, even if I don't call, don't write, don't visit, don't travel, don't remind myself and them how much I have loved and continue to love them. It's somewhat beautiful and a little more heartbreaking - and it goes a little something like this.

Place

A.F. Moritz

A place belongs to the one who has most deeply
loved it, they said, has hoped in it beyond
its self-corruption. The land, people, the city
is his if his nights are for recalling it,
calling it in tears of aloneness and amazed
thanksgiving: that luck let him kiss it in his childhood,
that it grew into him, is him, that he still wants
to have it, save it, he wonders what it knows
tonight, right now, how it is with that place,
if it's happy, dying, dead. So he went back
carrying his book of that city: a great book,
yet only a dim sketch of his memory,
though in its pages, closed and dark, the alleys
of cracked windows and lintels, and children's paths
through towering weeds behind the empty stores
and under sycamores down to the river, burn
with bright emptiness that in the city were full of dust,
discarded bottles, concrete crumbs, and rusted
shavings in broken light. He did not have
a dollar in that place. He could not find
a door to open. He did not know a soul.