Battle of the Wilderness, 1864, Military Forces Museum, Austin, TX, 2008 © Daniel Terna
The Return
By Bob Hicok
in Indy than Virginia, fewer mountains,
less green for our eyes, and our cat
wasn’t born there, she was born here,
under the house, and if nothing
is eternal, if the road-cut I walk
exposes three hundred million years
to sunlight and dog piss,
if the idea of the rose of the mind
is almost as tired as the fact
of the rose of your garden,
if a big chunk of Cali could be gone
any Tuesday, if my wife
and my love of my wife
and my love of my love of my wife
and Sontag writing about Cioran
will be equally swallowed
by history, that mouth
with no end, I prefer to fix a chair
in Virginia, a little glue
where the leg has come loose, and leave it out
at the edge of the Roanoke River
for my neighbor to sit in
and nurse her baby, to see them,
two chapters of hunger, from our house,
through the window that’s given me horses
and hawks and cedars and poems, a window
where it will be of the most use, in this life
and not the next, this life
with its clapping if you’re behind me,
if you’re beside me, if you’re with me,
if you’re listening
Bob Hicok reads “The Return”
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