Alan Williamson is a contemporary American master at illustrating the aura of place. One of his books is entitled The Muse of Distance. His new book, The Pattern More Complicated, contains this evocative poem that both steps back from the tradition, and into it:
A Place
It doesn't really matter where it is.
Chickens get fed, that will be eaten later.
Dogs die from poisoned meat left in the woods
by the hunters whose gunshots echo early,
shrunken old men waiting for the songbirds
at the far end of the olive grove. Winter is real here,
the hearths well-built and enormous, telling of
well-being and exposure, in a very old way.
Wild boars root out the vipers, and the porcupines
are as big as dogs back home.
Enough has been said of the beauty, but the hills
do wear the sun on their shoulders, long before
it softens the ice, down here.
And I, for a while,
am almost no one, a well-dressed foreigner,
and something inside flows clear, from the dream-time.
(Alan Williamson's poem "A Place" can be found in "The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems," by Alan Williamson. Univ. of Chicago. Copyright © 2004 by the University of Chicago.)
