Nowhere is Somewhere to Someone

They call this place Nowhere,

as if the word itself could drain the color from the fields,

strip the names from the creeks, silence the roosters at false dawn.

A place city dwellers call out there.

Yet here, in the soft hollow of Nowhere,

we keep a different map:

Robert Frost walks our frozen-cracked roads each November,

murmuring about walls and the mischief in them,

while Longfellow keeps time with the parlor clock

and the slow heartbeat of evening lamplight.

Our hands smell of turned earth and tomato leaves;

the chickens argue politics at sunrise,

the pigs dream of acorns they will never taste.

We grow our own small rebellions against grocery-store time.

In the front room, beneath the crooked lampshade,

Mozart and Beethoven sit down at the same hi-fi.

one offers champagne bubbles and moonlight on water,

the other answers with storm fronts and broken chords.

We listen until the notes settle like dust motes

and we still cannot say which one won.

Somewhere down the gravel, the neighbor farmer

carries a new weight in his chest,

a diagnosis shaped like winter.

We bring him soup he will barely touch

and sit in the kitchen saying almost nothing—

the most honest conversation we know how to have.

The children drag tractor-tire inner tubes to the top of Christie Hill,

launch themselves screaming into the reckless white of January

Bruises blooming across their legs and arms

like temporary awards for the memories of the thrill

It takes fifty long minutes to drive to Somewhere—

pasture giving way to pavement,

quiet yielding to the bright anxious chatter of signs.

And when we finally arrive at that glittering address,

when we stand among the hurry and the gloss,

we feel the old ache begin behind the ribs:

the pull, the I don’t think I belong here,

the quiet knowledge that everything necessary

is waiting fifty minutes back the other way.

So we turn around.

Always we turn around.

Because Nowhere, it turns out,

has the better light,

the truer clock,

and the only address

where the heart remembers how to stay.