A Chinese Poet Many Centuries

Splendid To Arrive Alone In A Foreign Country And Feel The Assault Of Difference. Here They Are All Along, Busy With Living; They Don't Talk Or Look Like Me. The Rhythm Of Their Day Is Entirely Different; I Am Foreign.

One Of Those Flash Epiphanies Of Travel, The Realization That Worlds You'd Love Vibrantly Exist Outside Your Ignorance Of Them. The Vitality Of Many Lives You Know Nothing About. I Could Live In This Town, So How Is It That I've Never Been Here Before Today?

The Longer You Are In A Place, The More You Get Under Its Layers.

When I Was Twelve, I Started Reading Eudora Welty, Thomas Wolfe, Flannery O'connor, James Agee, And - Do We Dare Breathe The Name - William Faulkner.

Memory Is, Of Course, A Trickster.