Quotes from David St. John

Place in writing often exists at that intersection between the reality of place and one's imagination about that place -- what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.

Having your evening coffee over A field guide of trails or alpine blossoms & so I need now to ask you Which of the old journals did you first Open to a map of my long wandering When did you first know I'd come back & how did you find yourself here & how did you know this single lantern You are reading by was the last possible Light to lead me home?

It may be that places exist in order that memory itself has a home.

When I came to see you It hurt me how thin you had become In the months of addiction & disease & although your particular abyss Was a man & not a drug The degradation was the same The same wasting of the flesh The same tapped-out well emptied Of the least leaf of emotion The same frozen rage

She was walking in the cherry orchard & the moon washed the stiff folds Of her gown with the misery of the century & ah those blisters of consciousness bursting All around her in the air like Descartes' shooting stars piercing the blackening sky As above her those dangling constellations of Tiny cerise planets trembled With the held expectations of the evening just past from "Cerise