"a place of first permission"

--Robert Duncan

For me it is that back yard, that grand half acre, green and groaning with wind and insects, the lying on my back looking at the sky, blue with clouds impossibly high--the blue I ascribe to someone's eyes, someone who once looked at me nakedly [in wonder in admiration in disbelief in... love?]--someone whose eyes turned on me so briefly and are so turned no longer.

"She it is Queen Under The Hill" the mother the other the me
the girl lying on the grass, the cottonwood fluff floating in the still-clear air of late May
the ground beneath with its little bumps and craters
the field beyond opening and opening

Often I, too, am permitted to return to a meadow and to that yard adjacent to the meadow. The two trees gone--or is it just one gone, one remaining? The terrible storms and the chainsaw, the firewood. The former gravel pit greened over and good for sledding.

The cows. The creek. The crawdads in the creek, the sunnies and bluegills and very occasional trout. The full catastrophe of country cliches, the down-home dowsing, the swampiness and black black loamy muck aspark with weeds.

"a disturbance of words within words" and the hollow tree for imagining Alice's rabbit.

The wet legs, the sopping shoes, the mud of it. The cud. The thistles and the flowers on the thistles. Queen Anne's lace and miniature daisies. Escape and bringing a friend and making up friends as you go along the streambanks.

The place of place.