This Be the Place: Not a Beginning, but a Following

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place.

“There is no place not the reflection of another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the place. I write at the mercy of this place.” — Edmond Jabès, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop

“No te olvides de estar en varias partes a la vez.” 
— Arnaldo Calveyra
 

I don’t know where to begin, but first: I don’t know in which language to do so. I can’t detach place from language. I’ve written these opening sentences in my native Spanish, but the title of the series—This Be the Place—sticks to me, and when I look back at this line it’s already in English. I follow the arc of the title from “This,” but when I try to get to “Place,” I stumble onto “Be.” Time appears dislocated: “Be”—why doesn’t it seem conjugated?

Now “this” is where I live: Croton-on-Hudson, a village in the Hudson Valley. It’s a name split into two rivers: The grand Hudson, swallowing the sun with its traces of Revolutionary War battles, industrial waste, and tiny jellyfish, and the more intimate Croton. I walk down a steep stretch of land to get to the latter river. One boot, then the other. Tree roots form a scattered stairway toward Mayo’s Landing, named after the actress, playwright, and screenwriter Margaret Mayo, a former Croton resident, head of the scenario department at Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, and writer of the first film it produced in 1917.

When I look up, I’m here—and here is this river, the Croton, and a faraway river, too, in Tigre, Argentina. They almost overlap in my mind: trees almost spilling over the edges of both, lines almost parallel converging into receding space. For an instant, the rivers look nearly the same, just slightly off, like when two images in a stereoscope don’t quite blend yet but you keep looking, in hopes that they will.

Since I moved from Argentina nine years ago, I often get the impression of living between two courses or two times: that of where and what is (“reality") and that of where and what otherwise would be ("fiction") had I remained.

The Argentine poet Arnaldo Calveyra wrote of Paris, the city he relocated to in 1960: “París, esta escalera.” What intimacy, to turn the city into a stairway, stepping onto it through the repetition of sounds: esta-escalera: es-es. Perhaps an invocation: Be, be.

Last night, while deciding which film to watch, I fell asleep for a second. In the briefest of dreams, these words appeared like subtitles: “the edges of the river as framing.”

Now the question is not how to begin but what to follow: what to turn to, where to remain. When I get to the water I always look left. The only visible construction is a private stone house on a cliff, its terrace overlooking the river. It used to be the Nikko Inn, a gathering place for stars such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks at the beginning of the 20th century, when New York was still the center of cinema. Some people say that Isadora Duncan also stayed there when visiting her sister Elizabeth, who ran a dance school in Croton.

I recently bought this black-and-white postcard of the Croton River online. The framing is the exact same as that of the image I see when I go to the river. There’s a stamp on the back that says 1907—the year the inn was built—but the postcard must be older, since the cliffs in it hold no construction. On the back, a vertical line parts the space in two. The top right reads “Address only on this Side”; the top left reads “Message may be written on this Side.” I hold a magnifying glass closer to and then farther from the handwriting, but it’s illegible. The lines are traced, tilted, within the limits of the space.

In clear type, the front of the postcard marks a specific location called “Deep Hole”—the deepest section of the river.

Exterior. Day. Croton River. Summer 2024. My youngest son and I are standing up to our waists in the water. I point toward the house on the cliff and tell him the story of the Nikko Inn. My son tells me, in Spanish, that one afternoon he and his friend were swimming in the river when they found a piece of ceramic. A neighbor told them, in English, that those fragments, found every now and then, could be pieces of the dinnerware once used at the inn—dishware that the river swallows and returns. Staring forward with our goggles on our foreheads, the landscape looks like the postcard, only in color and with us in it. My son stands a little ahead of me. We seem to be on the same line, perpendicular to the house, almost overlapping, but the line is slightly off. The trees around the river seem still, but they move in the water when we touch their reflection.

The author would like to thank Cornelia Cotton, the village historian Marc Cheshire, and the Croton Historical Society.