christinasanantonio, My Room, 2017
Helen Macdonald, from H is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2014)
Cormac McCarthy, from The Crossing (Vintage, 1994)
— Salman Rushdie, from Victory City (Random House, 2023)
Darren Braun, photo illustration for the article "The Truth Is Out There," Texas Monthly (June 2006)
The Panhandlers, "Moonlight in Marfa," Tough Country LP (The Next Waltz, 2023)
I'm writing this in the present, and you're reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between between us.
I might even be dead.
Yet, here I am.
Between the page and your eye.
Countless paradoxes like this redeem language.
But the voice cleaved in two during childhood is not a paradox of language. It’s a division of self, which is the multiplication of possibility. Don’t worry. Again, I’m not saying it’s bad. It might even ripen in us the appetite for love, the impulse to dab color onto stretched cotton, to make sounds that are beyond anything rational, but that sharpen rationality and make us see for the first time what we’ve been looking at our whole lives.
— Simon Van Booy, from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)
Cormac McCarthy, from The Sunset Limited (Vintage, 2006) Requiesce in pace
“She patted his hand. Gnarled, ropescarred, speckled from the sun and the years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. There God’s plenty of signs and wonders to make a landscape. To make a world.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
(Alfred A. Knopf, 1998)
— Salman Rushdie, from Victory City (Random House, 2023)
sacred places | summer memories
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Pierce K. Lewis, from “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene,” The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays, ed. Donald W. Meinig (Oxford University Press, 1979)
Karl Kirchwey, from “Roman Park, Noon,” At the Palace of Jove: Poems (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2002)
Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way, volume one of In Search of Lost Time (Grasset, 1913)
—Simon Van Booy, from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)
It is not memory we want, but forgiveness. We rub our hands against the dusk. Out of which sunsets blossom. Out of which your footsteps weigh, but lightly, on my soul, you, from whom relation darts wildly about like a bat in the rafters, gathering the last scraps of daylight held in abandoned mirrors, you, hoisting the heaviness of each failed dream, for it is you I touch as we shift the burden of our desires from one shoulder to another, as we watch the swallow’s flight decipher the landscape, as the scarecrows of feeling are trying on our words, for who can say, now, how many stars are missing?
—Richard Jackson, closing lines to “Possibility,” from Heartwall (University of Massachuetts Press, 2000)
When it is raining it is raining for all time and then it isn’t and when she looked at him, as he remembers it, the landscape moved closer than ever and she did and now he can hardly remember what it was like.
Martha Ronk, “In a landscape of having to repeat,” from In a Landscape of Having to Repeat (Omnidawn, 2004)
Eric Pankey, from “The Back-Story,” in Reliquaries (Ausable Press, 2005)


