I enjoy traveling, most of the time. Rather, I enjoy being on vacation, most of the time. I enjoy experiencing new places. I love it, actually, and wish I did it a lot more often, and the older I get, the more I realize that I wasted a lot of time in my youth not going to other places.

The problem, of course, has to do with the transportation part of things. It’s a fairly complex problem in that it has many layers. But that’s a story about a dilemma for another day.

One thing I know is that I need to start seeing other places — places which are new to me — soon. For my birthday, I put on my wish list:

• a passport (because the last time I left the country, when I was in college, all you needed was a birth certificate)
• a trip to someplace where I could have an adventure
• an adventure worth taking pictures of

I’m making my summer plans now.

One place I will probably not get to this year — but which I would love love love to see — is France. Paris in particular. Since I was little, the place has always held a fascination for me, perhaps because my mother is part French. Le français was the first foreign language I ever had enough real working knowledge of to be practical and useful. I began learning it in earnest, starting with the ad copy on the backs of cereal boxes at breakfast — on a trip to a village near Montréal when I was twelve. Things bloomed from there, and by eleventh grade I was reading Les Misérables in its original and acting in a short French play for academic competitions.

I am aggrieved to say that after a couple of decade with little practice, I now need help to translate with any quick accuracy. Some days it feels I have wasted whole swaths of my life.

Here is the final installment in the “poems inspired by place” series by Adam Holt. I hope you’ve been enjoying these as much as I have. (You can see the first one and the second one here.)

What places have inspired you? I’d love to know about them. Leave your thoughts — including a short poem about them, if you wish — in the comments below.

 

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Tour Eiffel: Four Images, Six Lines (Paris, 2013)

 

A blackboned skeleton dreams of molten blood.
Demigod of a godless age.
Last great structure before reason’s decline.

Misappropriated alien beacon,
would skin warm your iconic form?
You expose your bones and leave us to conjure flesh.

 

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