You Can'T Go Back Poem by gershon hepner

Home is where they have to let you in
when you go back, said Robert Frost;
it’s the inclusion where you must begin,
but only end up if and when you’re lost.
What happens to you, though, where there is no
there there, as Gertrude said of Oakland, or
if those who’re there don’t recognize or know
you, oh so different from the days of yore
when you belonged? You do not now. You can’t
go back, you realize, it’s wrong,
what Robert Frost declared. Your poste restante
has been returning all the mail you sent,
and though your home has got the same address
it had went you departed, you have spent
the coin that was its tender, tenderness.
They needn’t let you in the place you still
refer to as your home, and even if
they do you have to pray you’ve got the will
to leave it as survivor, not a stiff,
the latter exit hardly the inclusion
that you devoutly wish when you return.
Far better to delight in the illusion
of what it seemed, just like a Grecian urn.


Inspired by Adam Kirsch’s review of “Nothing Right, ” a collection of short stories by by Antonya Nelson (Intimate Betrayals, ” NYT Book Review, February 8,2009) :
Nelson operates on Robert Frost’s unsentimental principle that “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” People in “Nothing Right” seldom like their families, but they’re usually ready to defend them. Above all, women are prepared to defend their sisters and children against the husbands and fathers who let them down. In the title story, Hannah’s 15-year-old son, Leo, has a baby with his emotionally disturbed girlfriend, Niffer (a brilliantly horrible nickname for Jennifer) . The teen¬agers break up, inevitably, and Niffer sinks back into the “bleak, black miasma” of her depression, but Hannah remains at her post, taking care of the sickly infant. She “woke at the first rustle, the first minor squeak; she would never not be a mother, she deduced.... It was a pleasure to know something so surely, to do a job so well.”


2/9/09