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The Place


by Darryl Price


The pages are cracking without any help from 
you, waiting for the right wind with the 
right teeth to finish the job. Every story 
is torn apart at last as soon as 
you give your love. Why do we do 
it, retell the fable, rebuild the myth, restart
 
the argument when even the time of laughing 
together is to be thrown completely into the 
fire's falling down cave entrance and lost again? 
The trees know something that is too sad 
to remember. And if I go deep enough, 
I know that same sorrow, too. Pages, like 

the antique sails of great ships, sailing in 
the hands of giant clouds, are not fooled 
by any calm moment between sea and sky. 
There is nothing more important than seizing a 
blank field-like break in the paragraphs of our 
lonely lives to sit down and make a 

little lively music, laying our heads back against 
all the billions of stars and dreaming of 
something better somewhere. It's the only thing that 
keeps the glue stuck into the seams of 
the real and the silent potential of everything 
else to go on, but it's all inside 

one book. Still I whistle a funny little 
tune to myself, as if the mountain were 
not so obviously gathering flowers for a crystal 
stream fed lover to smile upon. Every man 
does the same dance before he is either 
killed or swept away from the doorstep to 

another eternity's beginning bite. Even if he says 
he knows not how, he will become the 
last dancer who alone can perform that language 
on the place where he himself has landed.
Little red dots turn out to be colonies
of starfish, the open eyes of constellation dragons.
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