Knox Hometown
A nostalgic haze clouds Sylvie’s eyes
as we pass the unspectacular places
woven into the fabric of her history; and I can’t
help but taste that strange flavor of loss
of something never possessed.
We treated the idea of a hometown as spitting
on humankind’s noble nomadic birthright.
All the ills that now plague us, we said often
(because that’s how you convince yourself of something),
the heart disease, the high blood pressure, the cancer,
the chronic pain, the addictions, the stress, the depression,
the anxiety, the greed, the selfishness, the violence—all of it
caused by forsaking our wandering
nature and staying rooted to places.
After all, weren’t the first humans
roaming hunters and gatherers?
Do we presume to know better
than they did?
Which always made me wonder
what early humans knew that we didn’t,
that made them trade in chasing mammoths
with spears for plows and fields
of barley and rye. Maybe they knew
what I do now, which is that so much of our
experience is a process of deciding which
awful problems to swap out
for somewhat less awful problems.
I can barely remember the place
I lived until we hit the road. It isn’t a part
of me. It’s not an axis on which I turned.
I have a void on the shelf in my heart
with the label “home” under it.
I wonder if you can choose a hometown
and make it yours by sheer force of will.
If you can ever really reclaim something stolen
from you before you ever knew
it was something you could have had.