Deep Travel
by Judy Kronenfeld

I was a child in a five-boroughed Garden of Eden/city—
the given, new, and crumbling, shining, grimy
world. And I heard talk of “sixth boroughs,”
places with the thickness of familiarity, places I imagined
I could pass into with no resistance—the way ghosts passed
through walls in 50s TV fantasies—and be at home.
And now so many once-strange latitudes have addresses in my mind,
which light up warmly when I hear or read their names: 7^th, 8^th, 9^th,
10^th , 11^th “boroughs,” so different from the 1^st through 6^th,
yet naturalized in the longue durée of cumulative or extended visits.

Sometimes there’s a kind of placeless favorite weather in my dreams,
jacket-cool as June in Norway, or autumn in the little park not far
from our Bronx apartment—light glancing, breeze-tossed, in the trees—
and I don’t know where I am. Or there’s a rhythmic brilliance
of magenta, flame, and lavender, that could be the joyous spring decor
in lamppost flowerpots in almost any town in France, or my long-gone
aunt’s hanging baskets down-dripping with impatiens in her summer
garden in Roslyn, Long Island. Sometimes I savor a sense
of restful busyness in whatever task I’m carrying out—
like the calm of Fanti fishermen mending their nets
on the Ghanaian coast, their smooth backs gleaming in the sun.
Sometimes my loneliness feels summed by a solitary red
farmhouse casting its shadow on the snow—on a spit of land
jutting into a fjord, or on the great plains of North Dakota.

Some part of me yet hopes, when I’m poled across
that last black frothing river, I will disembark
with no resistance, and be welcome
in the final borough, the 12^th, perhaps.

Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 5.

Judy Kronenfeld’s fifth full-length collection of poetry, Groaning and Singing, will be published by FutureCycle Press in early 2022. Previous collections include Bird Flying through the Banquet (FutureCycle, 2017) and Shimmer (WordTech, 2012). Recent poems have appeared in Juniper, Loch Raven Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, New Ohio Review, North of Oxford, Offcourse,  Slant, Verdad, Your Daily Poem, and other journals.

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