TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

No matter where I am in the world, no matter what beautiful landscape I might find myself in, no matter what new experience I might be having, I feel the pull of home. I don’t mean home as in place. I mean home as in people.

There are wonderful, necessary, life-changing adventures to be had by traveling, and still we long to hold and hug and kiss the people who aren’t there with us on that trip. On my last vacation, for example, I escaped the frigid Midwestern winter for sunny Miami, and it was heavenly. Good company, and good food, and warm sun on my skin, and yet — and yet! — I couldn’t wait to hug not only my children but also my dog.

I know I’m not alone in that feeling, that pull. Even when the sunset is beautiful on the water. Even when I’m eating something impossibly delicious. Even when I’m exactly where I want to be, part of me is back home, thinking of home. And by home, I mean family. The people who are my place in the world.

The speaker of today’s poem knows that feeling well. They are someplace faraway, doing painstaking and awe-inspiring work, the work of discovery, and yet — and yet! — they’re thinking of their beloved. Of home.

XII. Southern Constellations
by Brandon Kilbourne

Now in the closing days,
the quarry again stands silent,
our tools largely packed away,
as the fossils recovered over
this past month now sit within
the kitchen tent, their jacketing
plaster ghostly in its shade—
With the expedition nearly over,
I take about an hour each evening
to venture off from the others,
seizing these final chances
and the absent risk of nightfall
to quest for wildflowers
among the tundra’s hollows:
a souvenir from this land where
the summer sun never sets.
Bare fingertips burning
from the near-August cold,
I pluck stems of lemon-cup
poppies, collect white bells
of heather, stash delicate
globes of campion to press
between waterproof pages,
putting to use the field notebook
that I have neglected to fill with
my thoughts here on Ellesmere,
reflections on dwarf caribou,
the lost histories lived out
by fossil fish, and my fortune
not to happen upon a polar bear
all unrecorded but leaving room
instead to prepare this present.
Knowing that I will soon
again see dark eyes distant
in Chicago, hear your softly
Southern accent last heard
in a sidewalk goodbye,
I let my imagination indulge me
with the moment that petals
page-bound pass from my hands
into yours, when I rediscover
a sight outsized in its absence
despite the awe of finding
bone mementos of fallen
species and feeling the warmth
of a midnight sun grace my skin:
the constellations in the darkness
of your eyes after going thirty
days on this island at a loss
to behold the night and its stars.

"XII. Southern Constellations" by Brandon Kilbourne from NATURAL HISTORY © 2025 Brandon Kilbourne. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.