Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

From “A Map of the Lost World”

Rick Hilles has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, a Camargo Fellowship, and, most recently, a 2013 Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry from the Tennessee Arts Commission. He is the author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and A Map of the Lost World (2012), and his poems have been published widely in literary magazines. He lives in Nashville and teaches poetry at Vanderbilt University.

From “A Map of the Lost World”

I never wanted to make of you some trick
Of mirrored light, or lie of the imagination.
I never wanted this flurry of shooting stars
To obscure your final place in the night sky.
Is this why you kept the story to yourself?
Because there was no gift in it for us?
Your silence, now absolute, is not so different
From the pauses that follow certain music.
Or what sometimes comes before the words.
That some real part of you, still vital, waiting
To be found on the map of the lost world
Might return, if I went far enough, is the stuff
Of poetry. The kind that says, Be vigilant.
We must love one another while there is time.

Tagged:

TAKE THE SHORT READER SURVEY! CHAPTER 16 SURVEYOR SURVEYING