I Always Went Back to the Same Place

a poem by Lori Wilson


I Always Went Back to the Same Place


When I found it again—
down hill and up past the shed,
left and left where the logging road forks,
right at the meadow, the path’s steep drop—

I scrambled, half slid to the flat,
pushed through rhododendron to stone and light,
the river a ribbon below. I lay down
and pressed my bare back against heat.

I always returned to the same place,
wanting—what? This certain light,
these red-tails drifting, this pair of box turtles,
coridalys growing from a crack in the rock?

I went back—I liked best to see no one.
I went back for the full moon rise;
and when days cooled, so the rattlers
sought sun in the path, I went back.

Back when leaves drifted against fallen brush
when thin sheets of ice sealed the puddles,
back again when tadpoles filled them.

Back in the rain and the snow, I go back.


Lori Wilson works as a computer systems analyst in Morgantown, West Virginia. Her poems have appeared in literary journals including Southern Poetry Review, Georgetown Review, Cerise and 5 AM; on the Poetry Daily website; and in the anthologies Along These Rivers (Quadrant Publishing, 2008) and The Working Poet (Autumn House Press, 2009). She is a student in the MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry Translation at Drew University. Her first collection of poems, House Where a Woman (Autumn House Press, 2009), is available at the Appalachian Gallery and Monongalia Arts Center in Morgantown, and at Amazon.