20 may 2013

Bob Hicok [MiPOesias]

more Bob Hicok from Elegy Owed:

How we came to live where we live

The movie was over except the credits,

music like but not Satie, I don’t remember

if I felt the loss of the child deeply

or needed people to think I did,

as when you stand before a painting

in a museum for as long as you hope

says something good about you, even

when you’re not sure what that good thing is,

that you’re considerate of red or appreciate

the historical significance of the brocade

or know that the woman in the foreground

holding the scythe was the painter’s lover,

Mary Blake, who went on to swim

the English Channel twice, once forward,

once backward, but the vision was clear, I wanted

to carry tiny people around in a box, actors

who longed to perform Our Town

for an audience of any size, the numbers

didn’t matter if their attention

was complete, You would feel like the sun,

wouldn’t you, when they applaud, I longed

to ask the tiny actors in my arms,

and to feed them like the grasshoppers

I believed as a child only needed grass

in a jar to thrive, then we had cocooned

ourselves in our coats and were outside

with the gargoyles on the library, a gray sky,

I was carrying the box of actors

in how I believed the world was trying

to be perfect, nothing has to be real

to be real, like love, how often it makes me want

to eat you, not figuratively but actually

devour the hours you fill, one by one

or fill you, however that works with time,

and we walked until we couldn’t, so far

there was no more light from the city,

and built a bed there, a garden,

a perspective, what you might call

the staples of a life, and stayed.