Where It Is

A short poem about being turned toward another person in the middle of danger, confusion, and instinct.

Its repetition makes it feel incantatory, as if orientation toward another life is the only stable fact left.

'Where It Is' builds a four-fold litany on the line 'She turned to me', each return placing her gesture inside a worse danger: the 'wild river', the 'overwhelming fire', the 'rifle alley', and the loss of a pet. The poem then drops the refrain for a flat closing proposition - 'Freedom is instinct, / even when you don't know, / where you are' - so that her repeated turning is reframed as instinct rather than choice, the title's 'where it is' answered by a place no map can give.

The power of the piece is in the gap between its escalating images and its deadpan moral. The danger pictures rise toward the lethal ('trapped by the rifle alley') and then deflate into the domestic ('when her pet was gone'), which keeps the turning from reading as melodrama and makes it instead a reflex that fires whether the threat is grand or small. The closing definition severs freedom from knowledge: you do not have to know 'where you are' to act rightly, because the turning toward another comes from instinct underneath thought. Read against the collection's title, 'At The Edge Of The Riddle', this short poem locates the riddle's edge in exactly that turning - the one stable orientation the speaker can name while everything around it floods, burns, or vanishes.