Bob Schildgen

No Home to Go

by Bob Schildgen

And how the leaves do fall and best friends fade
into candy-box funerals where uncles cough
and no one knows one melody to play.

And how the song that shook our hearts one spring

is leveled to a half-forgotten hymn.

Not one remembered medley left to sing.

The levee gone and paved for tourist trade.

Creeks dried up. Corncribs, sheds, and barns cave in.

Field mice quibble in the tombstone shade.

Childhood roadside willows all cut down.

Dance hall closed, the windows boarded up.

A stoplight dangles in an empty town.

A candle flickers in an empty room.

No home to go because there is no home.

Fencerow no more, no place wild roses bloom.

Return

by Bob Schildgen

Home. The cat’s meow of a creaking gate.

Home. Evening west wind with a nutlike scent

of hay. Tractor lights. They’re working late

against the weather and against the rent.

Flowers ascend their proper lattices

where old brown hands impose a tender order

on morning glories, vines, and climbing peas.

Stiff hollyhocks patrol the garden border.

But lightning flashes in the clouds gone east.

A swallow scribbles on the twilight sky.

Deep down you know this place will not last.

You can’t go home again and yet you try.

Bob Schildgen is the former managing editor and columnist at Sierra, the national magazine of the Sierra Club. Some of his poetry has been published in The Kerf; occupoetry; Peace or Perish: A Crisis Anthology; Imitation Fruit; San Diego Poetry Annual; Green Hills Literary Lantern, and The Atlanta Review.