You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

If we opened people up, we’d find landscapes. —Agnès Varda

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.

It’s a mistake to think of one’s life as plot, to think of the events of one’s life as events in a story. It’s a mistake. And yet, there’s foreshadowing everywhere, foreshadowing I would’ve seen myself if I’d been watching a play or reading a novel, not living a life.

Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.

Memory itself is a kind of architecture. —Louise Bourgeois

form is never more than an extension of content. —Robert Creeley

I remember something the poet Stanley Plumly said to me about poems: “They begin in the middle and they end in the middle, only later.”