I ready myself to read poetry for a group of graduate students. They’ve had the ingenuity to find an old, abandoned chapel near campus and turn it into a poetry space. Eavesdropping from a pew, I find myself listening once again to choruses of before; before the first published book, before marriages and mortgages and self-support. There are lots of munchies—I’ve forgotten how hungry students are, how irregular the meals. There are students reading poems from phones rather than spiral notebooks, whose edges might as well be the coiling of years between us. There is a party developing for later (more snacks) and someone awkwardly invites me. Wow. I don’t mention that I haven’t driven after dark in two years.

Reading to the river of faces, I see all the ferocity, confusion, ambition, and dreaminess that I myself must have worn in the day. But there is something more. They are all looking straight at me and paying attention. They are respectful, focused, and dead serious about their craft. I realize then that the mask of The Elder I wear is, in fact, not a mask. I am old. And though I know the great secret of old age is that we still yearn for a sense of arrival, the young ones believe we are complete. What must they think when our poems ache with the same unfinished, unanswerable business of our earlier years?

When I was studying English at U.T. Knoxville, I was lucky enough to live in a historic neighborhood called Fort Sanders. The writer James Agee spent his childhood there in one of the clusters of gothic-constructed homes eventually sectioned into student apartments. Most had turrets and long lawns—now is the night one blue dew . . . it is of these evenings I speak. We lived among ghosts of the Agee family, hanging out on wide Queen Anne porches, smoking marijuana, the scent vaporing down every street, seeping from dark screens while Agee’s genius and alcoholism and cigarette embers burned inside us. It was a time of believing any of us could be the next Great Southern Writer, and we dressed the part; mannish black blazers, big glasses, Chinese slippers. Which is my little boy, which is John? He’s the one with the Chinese slippers on . . . intoned Tennessee Williams when he spoke on campus, his tribute to Carson McCullers. We also saw the gracious Eudora Welty speak and died laughing when we read “Why I Live at the P.O.” Appalachian literati, my friends and I knew this story as more than theoretical, we had lived it.

For four years the grand old houses were the incubators of our stories and poems. We walked where Agee walked with his father, listening to the L&N railroad at night, spreading quilts on grass, unaware that the neighborhood itself was soon to chug off. Developers would discover and destroy the old homes and put up high rises. They would leave, ironically, a tiny sterile park with an Agee plaque explaining the history they had forever dashed to dust.

I pause on the steps of the students’ poetry haven to look straight up at the stained glass, the fieldstone and steeple. I wander the interior just enough to view its unmaking; torn carpet, archaic plumbing, dim and outdated lighting. Old churches are sometimes saved from extinction by becoming art houses and I hope this is one of them. The lone surviving structure in my beloved Fort Sanders is Laurel Theatre, a musical performance venue, formerly a Presbyterian church from 1898. It stands low and stubborn in a sea of corporate ruin. I imagine the students’ Albemarle chapel with its rich symbols, the downward dove representing the divine’s descent to earth, the red door signifying sanctuary, surviving as a church of poetry. Art. Mystery. Surely, there is something of the imago dei in our created images echoing off these once-sanctified walls.

Sharon Perkins Ackerman is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, Appalachian Places, and many others. Her second poetry collection A Legacy of Birds is available on Amazon and Kelsay Books.