I grew up under the sky above what once had been an ancient glacial lake: “Land of Ice,” “river of awe,” “near the cold, chilling waters,” “river of ambush/surprise.” The Salish called it Nemissoolakatoo.

There was no kindergarten. Before I was born, my parents had lived in Paris when my dad was drafted to work at SHAPE in the Signal Core, checking the equipment in a simultaneous translation theatre. They returned with books of paintings from the Louvre, and we listened to Beethoven and Debussy and Brubeck on a small phonograph, watched the slides they’d taken with Dad’s Leica, nearly memorized them. I pasteurized the milk hung in a pail from a rope on the apple tree, colored, painted, played with my brothers, the dogs, my dolls, made up stories for them. My mother read to us every night. This was my kindergarten.

Maybe 10 of us lived in one square mile. More now, when I return—from one of the densest neighborhoods in a county of more than 9 million. More than 200 languages. Where, at night, one rarely sees the stars. But the fireworks need no translation.

Poetry is the translation of a moment before words.

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Nightfall Marginalia (What Books Press, 2023) is Sarah Maclay’s fifth collection. Her poems and essays, supported by a Yaddo residency and a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and awarded the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and a Pushcart Special Mention, among other honors, have appeared in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Tupelo Quarterly, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Best American Erotic Poetry: From 1800 to the Present, Poetry International, where she served as Book Review Editor for a decade, and beyond. She teaches at LMU and offers workshops at Beyond Baroque, roaming between LA and her native Montana.