260 Miles, as the Crow Flies, Between Greenfield, Massachusetts and Rochester, New York by Laura Sackton

[349 words]

“sometimes one place wants to slip into the other”
—Dar Williams

	—So we’re talking first loves and the stories
they told us about the places that made them,
the stories that grew in us a longing we hadn’t
previously named. We’re talking love without
place is impossible, is formless, talking attraction
is another word for nature, for this hilltop, this wave,
this ecotone of light and flight and home. 

	—Before 
the first person I loved kissed me for the first time,
I listened to her narrate the colors of the fields 
that grew her. She held Cayuga Lake in her mouth
with the same tender attentiveness she later used to hold
me (first time) in that same mouth.

	—It was late spring in Vermont and raining
apple blossoms. She told me about the orchard
she’d grown up loving: gnarled bark and abundant
fruit, the view from the picking ladder, overgrown 
hedgerows, flash of sunlight on deep blue, the whole 
glittering patchwork of Western New York unfolding 
around her like wings. 

	—We were only twenty-two 
but her voice was ancient, it was woodsmoke and
fireflies and the bright eyes of winter foxes and the tree-like 
creases in the old faces of the people who gave her her name,
it was bedrock and glacier and the autumn-sorrow
that burrows close with the departing daylight, and even now 

	—I can’t listen 
to that one Dar Williams song without thinking about how, 
with the breath just before the breath she used
to tell me she loved me (first time), she told me how it felt

	—to carry the belonging of soil in her bones. I know 
what love draws me closest to myself. 

	—I never walked through 
the knee-high grass in the summer fields 
that made her. She loved that place more 
than she loved me. She left me for those colors
and I left her for the ocean.

	—It’s been seventeen years 
since those luminous ridgetop nights we spent 
tracing maps of hereness across each other’s skin and

I’m still speaking the language of porousness to landscape we learned 
when we fell in love by telling each other what trees we came from.

Laura Sackton is a queer poet who lives and writes in rural Massachusetts. Her work has appeared in West Branch and is forthcoming in the Tampa Review, The Comstock Review, and Terrain.org. She’s known around the internet as an evangelist for earnestness.

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