Two Poems by Nick Hilbourn

Old Man
The day started with a sunrise.
The farm was wet with dew
and an old man sat down his drawing materials
until evening
when it was time to look for his knife.

You know him. You’ve seen his posture
collecting the resting face of uncontrollable foliage
swallowing the road. He looks made of offal.

Carrying himself from the house to the truck.
Putting himself in container after container to go
to the newer part of the barn. The one that has a drain
that runs out the back to the rose colored mud.
He puts the color into his pastorals if you pay attention.
Sunsets look like blood stained clouds.

The chickens are walking in flock.
Their sound punctuates the countryside with ellipses
and his hands nest around one, holding it at the bottom
and carrying it like laundry.
He killed the bird with one motion.
Laid it for a massage, the blade coughed succinctly
and filled the world with color. Steel table lapping it up.
The man held the chicken’s twitching body to the surface,
waiting for the nerves’ fire to die.

The image appears to him like a bonfire dry hay.
He doesn’t know
that a ghost lives in the basement
then and now.
It chews on the loose hair
in the drain with eyes like pinholes that see everything
way too close.
The chicken was scared in the seconds before.
Life pulsed through its needle eyes and its soul
jumped out of its body to hide in the man’s throat. He doesn’t know it
then or now. His body is a host
and he will discover it with time
but only at its end.
The ghost waiting for him by the drainage pipe.
Chewing on a strand of hair like a toothpick
as the man plucks the last feather,
pulls out the machine work of tubes with a soft grunt
and no more.
Holding it under the faucet, petting its skin
as if to calm it.
How gentle, the ghost mulls.
A lump moves up and down in the old man’s neck.
Not yet.
The land curls into ripeness.
Life should be so, the land alights.
But not too soft, as you know.
Never too careful.

---

When my girlfriend laughed at my Valentine for Jesus
I turned into a heart when I was looking for God.
There was a back shelf in the CVS full of Valentine’s Day cards and
I picked the best one. At the empty field at the end of the street,
I dug a hole and buried the pink card stock. Closed my eyes and
listened to the wind blow bone flutes. I was hollow inside and the air
played through the perforated fibers of my bare frame. I wanted to do more
but these are very difficult things to grasp. Certain places became
holy at this time in my life. Open face deities reflecting the sky.
I passed by them with a soft candle smile ruminating behind
my question mark face. The way you regard the sacred is to never
speak its name aloud. That’s how it belongs to you.

I came back after ten years and houses covered everything.
A bulldozer had heaped my dark into a loose assemblage of dust.
The hole was there somewhere. Floating under the palm of sidewalk.
Nestled and waiting,
the heart never stops working. No matter how matter how many people
laugh at me, this story keeps pumping blood out. The concrete is wet but
I can’t find the body it belongs to… “It’s okay,” I think but it’s not.

Some ideas are shaped like muscles. After they enwrap the body,
they squeeze blood out through the palms.
It doesn’t matter if I recover, renounce or forget, I am
infected. I will never not remember this place and I am ill with its ghost
A cancer that haunts just behind the eyes, where the world inverts.
I wake up in that empty field again. Card stock freshly buried.
Wet soil staining my forehead. Hearts are spirals, always returning to their origin.
Empty space at the center.. Granules of dry dirt.
Can you believe it? All that time under the ground there was a god,
an open-mouthed beast god, drinking my blood, grinning
like a Jack-O-Lantern.

---

Nick Hilbourn has published three chapbooks: Pacha, Webster County and Folk Gospels. He hosts a writing podcast on Spotify, Meditative Week of Poetry. More information is available at nickhilbournisaround.com