ittookplace_t.jpg

It would have been the evenings people came for, if they came.
A red etched into the central lake; the mayor’s son serenading
what exactly on the far bank. ‘I have needed you for leaving you,’
he seems to say, the shadow the belltower casts doesn’t elsewhere,

I won’t forget you anywhere. They would have come for evenings
giving way—portcullising—to night, lamps building into the sky.
Someone’s daughter hanging off a balcony like a trapeze waiting
for motion, the clockwork of. Would have been the voices of

her parents friends and lovers come for. Voices, and ropeladders
trellising the cragtop monasteries, where the brothers are visible
and invisible as the spectacle is. ‘How did you travel?’ the people
are asked, ‘Well,’ in reply. And settle to local colour, the aniseed

of liquor, sat at outside tables here where interiors are neglected
as the spectacle is. ‘Not so much to see as pause,’ you are told,
‘not so much a destination as unremarked, passing through.’ It
would have been what people came for, the image at its halt

on the disc of an iris. The people bridging even before leaving
the synapses from sight to spoken, begun in the act of retelling
to the distance and direction of home the spectacle, its surfaces:
‘It took place in a town I think called M———, or would have.’