Before Civitella, I struggled to finish my second collection of poetry for both the usual reasons—time, the challenge of ambition—and also because I knew I needed to leave my home to discover it again, to have that distance from myself for my imagination to restore, if only momentarily, its losses. At Civitella, I finished the book in three weeks, ordered its pages on the billiards table, somehow completed both the poem-making and book-making processes at once. Every day, the enormous window in Giardino revealed the secret garden and the stunning Umbrian landscape below it. Sometimes I had to pull the curtain across because the beauty of that view consumed my focus. “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those,” Frost wrote, “Not in position to look too close.” But for six weeks, my position was one of direct proximity. For me, that curtain is drawn now for good, but I’m grateful for the life I had here and the one I have left to remember and imagine the view.