Choose a quiet place, a ruins, a house no more a house, under whose stone archway I stood one day to duck the rain.
The roofless floor, vertical studs, eight wood columns supporting nothing, two staircases careening to nowhere, all make it seem
a sketch, notes to a house, a three- dimensional grid negotiating absences, an idea receding into indefinite rain,
or else that idea emerging, skeletal against the hammered sky, a human thing, scoured seen clean through from here to an iron heaven.
A place where things were said and done, there you can remember what you need to remember. Melancholy is useful. Bring yours.
There are no neighbors to wonder who you are, what you might me doing walking there, stopping now and then
to touch a crumbling brick or stand in a doorway framed by the day. No one has to know you thing of another doorway
that framed the rain or news of war depending on which way you faced. You think of sea-roads and earth-roads you traveled once, and always in the same direction: away.
You think of a woman, a favorite dress, your old father's breasts the last time you saw him, his breath, brief, the leaf
you've torn from a vine and which you hold now to your cheek like a train ticket or a piece of cloth, a little hand or a blade - it all depends on the course of your memory.
It's a place for those who own no place to correspond to ruins in the soul. It's mine. It's all yours.
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