The visit in Max Reif's title needs no journey. The speaker builds the city "again / from its latency," a word that suggests something dormant but intact, like an image waiting on undeveloped film. He travels through "maps of memory," and the poem's central idea is that the past can be rebuilt from the inside. Seen from far enough away, it brings contentment instead of pain.
Reif's main trick is to merge two landscapes, the street and the brain. The roads lead to "comfortable / furrows like the ones etched / on grey-matter surfaces / in photos of brains." "Furrow" works twice: it is a line ploughed in a field and a fold in the cortex. A few lines later the roads become "sweet grooves." The word could also call up the grooves of a record, though the poem never says so. Either way, it suggests a path so well worn that the traveller follows it almost automatically. Leaving, by contrast, was violent. The speaker was "flung to the east, / then to the west, spun / in a centrifuge of time," and the line break after "spun" makes the reader feel the turn.
The sentence about being "led away" carries across a stanza break to the poem's most concrete memories: "the child / first impressioned by the carnival / of lights down on Easton near / the Furniture Store." The street name and the shop are small, unglamorous details. The poem never explains where Easton is, and it doesn't need to, because the naming makes the place feel lived in. "Impressioned" is an unusual coinage. It suggests a stamp pressed into wax, or light striking film, and so presents the child as a surface that took in the world. The television's "flickering / phantoms" in "our old, dark living room" are ghostly, and the stanza ends with "Daddy's beloved mansmell / and shiny, bald head." "Daddy" and the run-together "mansmell" sound like words from a child's nose and mouth. The most intimate detail comes last, with no comment.
Formally, the poem is free verse. There is no rhyme and no steady metre, and the lines are short and often broken on small words like "near" and "like," so the sense tips forward into the next line. The rhythm is that of a thoughtful voice working something out, not of song. The stanzas also vary in length, as if they were rooms of different sizes.
The metaphors keep shifting. After the roads comes a drawer: "I open memory's drawer / to find the storms / that raged here once." The storms "have blown themselves out," and the "old volcanoes" are "quiet now, / grown over with green." Weather and geology replace the map, and each image says that turbulence has passed and life has covered it. The poem does not say what the storms were. It only reports that they are over, and that restraint keeps the stanza from turning sentimental.
The last two stanzas turn playful. "Past and present make love / in a wholly aesthetic universe / with the added feature / of a living pulse" is bold, but "added feature" sounds like a product brochure, so the speaker seems to smile at his own grandness. He then becomes "a metaphysical Cessna pilot / flying curlicues," a charming choice. A Cessna is a small, modest plane, and curlicues are decoration, not destination. He is looping through time for the pleasure of it. The closing toast, "Raising my cup / of this heady blend," looks out through a "picture-window of time," a homely, suburban frame that quietly echoes the "old, dark living room" of childhood. The speaker is again inside a room watching the world, but now the room is bright and the view is chosen. Calling it "elegant simplicity" is both comic and sincere, since the poem has been anything but simple.
That mix is what makes the poem worth reading. It treats memory as neither a lament nor a museum. It blends brain scans, carnival lights, volcanoes and light aircraft without strain, and it ends in quiet satisfaction at having come through. For students, it shows how a poem can pile up and swap metaphors and still keep one clear feeling at its centre.