from Moosilauke Ravine Lodge
By now we know this by heart—
how to set the long wooden tables by the windows,
which are propped open tonight to let in warm late September.
Isabel sets the forks and Margaret the soup bowls and I carry
the pallet of glasses, the whole sparkling weight
of them. Outside, sunset is falling fast over the ridgeline,
all the way to the southern peak. This is a place that shows you
your smallness, waking up each day to this sloping giant
of mountain. Knowing your place in the topography of things.
It was my mother who first taught me to read the oyster-shell
patterns of the topo lines. We traced fingers over mountain ridges
made map-flat—lines dark, pushed close—then blank space
of valley floor. I know now that, broken into its Latin roots,
topography means “place-writing,” as in this place has written itself onto me.
As in this place is another form of writing—its map is also a body
of text, where I can trace all the words of these past few months here,
all the words that have, finally, led me here, miles from everything I thought
to be true, here where light is now moving like water over the valley.
I have learned this topography by heart—high swoop of mountain
and still-shining dinner table and the widest sky I’ve ever stood under.
It’s as if I finally learned to read the map of my life, the topography
of these twenty-one years. It was always pointing me here.