Place

You can’t go home again is a fine title for a book and is surely true on several levels. Change is as fundamental to our reality as anything – going on millions of years now.

But on a human scale, if you have personally been to a place and carefully looked around - lived a little in that place, even if only momentarily - you will find that when you return, although much has possibly changed, the essential nature of the place will reveal itself again to you.

If you do not experience this deep sense of place from time to time, you are missing something as fundamental to our reality as anything. Human beings have been connected to places going on millions of years now.

You can belong to places on the earth.

You start by looking around where you are. You will begin to see the place. Much of the process will happen below the level of your consciousness but you will begin to notice things. As you live for a time, only passing through, as we are, even in a place as simple as an alleyway, trashcans for décor, a sycamore tree might become a landmark for your coming and going or perhaps even merely a crack in the pavement.

For me a bigger place is the river – the Kaw – particularly the stretch around the bridge connecting downtown Lawrence, Kansas and North Lawrence. I have been writing about the river for some time now and I am farther from recognizing all of its elements and characteristics than when I started.

But I know where I am when I am there. I belong in that place.

You need only to become more aware to come home.

The sandbar

If you walk out on the sandbar below Bowersock North,

you will probably see little more than sand and rocks -

driftwood and an occasional dirty plastic bottle.

Perhaps you will see more.

But there is really not much more to see

than sand and rocks,

some driftwood

and maybe some herons or gulls –

perhaps more.

I have been going out on the sandbar

more times than I can count now

and this is just about it.

There is the water, of course,

sometimes sunlight sparkling off ripples,

and sometimes, I suppose,

you might see more,

but mostly on the sandbar

there is sand and rocks -

driftwood and some miscellaneous junk.

Blood draw

 

I waited at the red light,

a white fold of gauze

taped to my tan arm.

A man with a red beard

crossed in the walk

and sticking out of his black backpack

was one long-stemmed red rose.

Now I am not a religious man

and colors and coincidences

are only that for me,

but I prayed my blood

was red enough

for another year –

at least.

I think I can wait

a minute

for the colors to change.

It will only seem like years;

and years

will seem like minutes.

And then the man with the red rose,

turned and walked west

and I drove on to the east.

Just a little stick,

she had said.

We had laughed a little about people

preferring one arm or the other.

Nothing to it,

I thought.

Walking out the door,

I told her I would

forget how she had stuck me in another minute.
And then I would forget her.

And then the man with the red beard.

And then my prayer

pulsing through

my veins.

And a long-stemmed red rose.