"Places to Return"

Thanks to Rebecca for forwarding this to me; it was today's poem in the Writer's Almanac.

Places to Return
by Dana Gioia

There are landscapes one can own,

bright rooms which look out to the sea,

tall houses where beyond the window

day after day the same dark river

turns slowly through the hills, and there

are homesteads perched on mountaintops

whose cool white caps outlast the spring.



And there are other places which,

although we did not stay for long,

stick in the mind and call us back—

a valley visited one spring

where walking through an apple orchard

we breathed its blossoms with the air.

Return seems like a sacrament.



Then there are landscapes one has lost—

the brown hills circling a wide bay
I watched each afternoon one summer

talking to friends who now are dead.

I like to think I could go back again

and stand out on the balcony,

dizzy with a sense of déjà vu.



But coming up these steps to you

at just that moment when the moon,

magnificently full and bright

behind the lattice-work of clouds,

seems almost set upon the rooftops

it illuminates, how shall I

ever summon it again?