Places I’ve Half Been

There are places I've half-been,

Dimly lit in the valleys of my memory,

As I see them from the vague hills of imagination.

Gray-green spanish moss hangs from the trees there,

Over shaded lanes that, at night, are filled with

The night sounds: mating frogs and crickets, croaking and chirping,

Their percussive syncopation piercing walls that stand

Where they have stood for lifetimes before me.

This was the only place they didn't burn during the war.

It's residents are conscripted, unwittingly, as its faithful curators

Until death. We sleep in bouts, casting off our sheets

Then pulling them back on when we get cold again.

There are places I've half-been,

Where paint peels from the windows of neglected storefronts

that have always housed the same products, leftovers from the fifties,

Switchblade combs, an excess of lace and incandescence.

All of the colors here are muted, understated hues,

Just a stroke beyond warm, monotonous sepia.

The street signs are proprietors of distant meanings,

Abercorn and Victory, things incomprehensible to a new strain.

In these places, the sun is setting on a hazy afternoon

Always. Someone gentle might offer a room in which

to spend a night that will take eons to fall and pass.

Yes, there are places I've half been,

In your heart and in your arms, in your favor,

In the future I saw, where we're inseparable

And free to live however we see fit.

These are places that exist in nostalgic reverie,

Storage for dreams, a fool's paradise.

These half-places are always just half-past

possibility, half-through and half-onward to fulfillment--

to places where I never have to sleep alone,

Where, of the two of us, each loves the other

Beyond what either of us imagined possible.

But these are places I've only half been.