19 may 2013

Bob Hicok [Narrative Magazine]

from Bob Hicok’s Elegy Owed:

Born again

One day I was introduced to a bed

in which a woman was born, gave birth, and died.

The woman who introduced me to the bed

was the granddaughter of the woman

who was born in the bed and never lived

in another house.

Being a child of wind, I whispered

in the company of so much permanence.

The woman found my reverence ridiculous.

I knew this because she took off her clothes

and got on the bed as a way of asking me

to join her in making the bed a living bed.

It was in that bed that the woman told me

she tried to kill herself at seventeen.

Lots of Valium under a tree with horses nearby

ignoring her to eat.

This is my second life, she said, the one I got

for not knowing more about drugs, for being shy

when it came to my father’s shotgun

in my mouth.

By then, she’d lived a hundred years

in dog years beyond when she’d wanted to die.

When I told her this, she said, Woof.

The bed squeaked each time we turned

or breathed our bodies into each other.

I keep asking myself if this story is true.

I seem to believe it is, seem to admire time

and making love on top of musical springs

and the world every day for not killing itself,

not exploding or burning down

as it might reasonably want to.

And the woman?

I seem to know her or contain her or think

the valley in which I live

would resemble her if someone had the language

to convince it to rise and be a woman

wearing a flowered dress.

Women are more likely to wear gardens

than men, to be valleys, to hold time

in their bodies and take us

inside what is passing

as it passes, what is arriving

as we leave.

And the man?

I seem to be him or want him

to be the feeling that stars

would look down on us and ask

What are you going through

if only they had mouths.