NON-DESCRIPT PLACES

To have known that sometimes

Creativity is also the capacity

To turn the non-descript

Into the illustrious

Passionate and meaningful

Through the work of love

And imagination

Mount Fuji or Machhu-Pichhu

Harlem or Mont- Sainte Victoire

Something that was always there

Close by, and close to one’s heart

Becomes the subject for celebration

The landscapes of Makondo, Arles or Khazak

Or the remote town of Tutuola

Become so inscribed in minds

Ready to be called forth

Turn into tourist destinations, even.

But the landscapes of art and literature

Are fabulations and de-familiarizations

Of another kind

You never find something as encountered

By somebody else's imagination

Other than a distant likeness

Of elements encountered and imagined by you

A unique constellation in itself.

Maybe the work

Of turning the everyday

Into a workable space

With the pulsation of life

Is what turns the mundane into exceptional

The beauty or complexity of the natural

Is seldom surpassed

In a representation

One is not out to write a travelogue

But attempting to move beyond

To reach someplace often commonplace

That gradually starts becoming otherwise

With a text or image

Yet leaving too much unsaid

That more could always be made out of it

Identical or different

(And what space on earth

Has not been already touched by humankind?)

Sometimes that place of novelty

And antiquity

Is all that one is out to discover

Outside the world of Columbus

An omnibus from a bus ride.