Place

A short poem of loss and search, where even cosmic images cannot stabilize what has already come apart.

A spare poem of search and departure. 'I did not place it / I looked for it' sets the unnamed thing in motion; 'Something came apart / And I went to find it.' Against this restlessness the poem sets two fixed bodies - 'Nothing more solid than the Sun,' 'No way more happy then the ch'inging Moon' - yet still the speaker 'left,' troubled 'about the inside / The was,' having abandoned 'your outside work alone.'

The poem turns on the difference between placing and finding, between fixing something and going after it. Whatever 'it' is stays nameless, so the reader feels the displacement without ever locating the loss. The sun and moon are offered as the only stable points - solidity and changeable happiness - but neither holds the speaker, who keeps leaving anyway. The fractured line 'Life got trewblesome about the inside / The was' (with its misspelled 'trewblesome' and the stranded 'The was') is the poem's true center: the trouble is interior, about a past tense - 'The was' - that has come apart and cannot be re-placed. In a collection called 'On Your Way In One Place,' this is the title inverted: motion that never settles, a place looked for and never set down.