Elegy Owed (7 page)

When it's time, the hotels of Ardmore no longer interesting

in their facades, the small bags of peanuts you used to buy

suddenly twice as big, as if someone far away, looking

out a window at a barge, had thought your appetite

was asking to be doubled, and the little girl you showed

how to affix playing cards to her spokes has gone off

to college, that school where anthrax arrived in a letter

and killed the chemistry professor whose face on TV

looked so small, like he'd been the head of a doll,

when you cried, fully and stupidly alone in your room,

literally into your hands, wiping the snot on your cat,

knowing this would set her about licking for hours, this spite

after emotion, you recognized it first when you were seventeen,

when you bit Sharon, not hard enough to break skin

but trust certainly was lost, and why, because she said

That must have been hard
about military school, no longer

interesting because you've cataloged their moods, the different

shadows of the different cornices, the wrought-iron gate

so recently improved no longer sings when it opens, and you

should go, a whole new city, boxes of your life

staying closed, most of them, in stacks of who were you

after all, really, when it comes down to it, this collection

of how you said “shows to go you” to the magazine guy, of wearing

the apricot slippers, so have no set phrases, give your feet

a choice, I know, it's tiring, to be new, to even try, who am I

to judge, look at me, my head shaped just like yesterday,

and this appointment with language I keep, as if eventually

a handle will appear, and the sound of me saying
I'll turn it

will be me turning it, to what, some sense of an other side,

which if you touch it first in your new home, in the away,

call me, the description, even with its holes, the torn edges

where to say a thing is to rip it, will be everything to me,

the beautiful frays.

Holding warm bear shit in my hand.

Thinking people like me

are weak who want to believe in angels

and people like me are stupid who refuse to believe

in angels.

Wanting to make love

to a rosary in a nun's hand.

Admiring the vertebra

of a cow on the table next to roses, roses beside keys,

four belonging to doors I don't recall

slamming or walking through or painting colors

of welcome, the music of absence

when I shake the keys, the absence of music

when I don't.

Heating a knife on the stove

and touching my forearm three times and living

with a scar resembling a cactus as the only painting

on my body.

Carrying ash of you to the Atlantic

(Kittery), bonebits to the Pacific (Point Lobos), giving you

to seals and otters and pollution, to waves and forgetting

and whales.

Wondering if I am inventing you

by remembering you or remembering you by writing of you

as silence sleeping inside a nest of shadow and hair.

Of breath

and shadow and hair.

People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine

in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains

and driving and planting tomatoes

and harvesting tomatoes, kissing

or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed,

a spider living by the stove

as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio

being killed after their owner

opened their cages and shot himself,

people talking about childhood

while holding babies, hands behind the heads

that can't support their own weight,

eating lunch and other meals at tables,

sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke,

having a beer in a room before a funeral

and a beer in the same room after the funeral,

a spider living in the window as a woman

cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it

to her mother's chemoed head in Memphis,

people going on too long and people

letting people go on too long,

standing in a doorway meeting the lover

of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea,

liking her smile, people drinking too much

and people letting people drink too much,

making beds for them, helping them in,

people sitting beside people under trees,

trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under

whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.

I don't want her to die.

She doesn't want her mother to die.

Five minutes after we were married, her father died.

The limo drove us to the hospital.

She stood in her veil at the side of his bed.

A nurse congratulated us.

We didn't know what words to put in our mouths

so we left our mouths empty.

I think of us as the top of a wedding cake

standing guard over the door his body had become.

She doesn't want me to die.

The Buddha said we shouldn't want anything but the Buddha

wanted us to believe that.

At the funeral, she wore a tricycle being pushed by her father

when she was five, her legs out to the side.

That's only true in this poem, like the cloud I'm looking at

is only true in this sky.

In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.

It's about to rain, not in the poem but in the thinking

that led to the poem,

the poem that helped me recall

I can still touch her entire body,

the soft parts, hard parts, bendy parts, all the places she'll hide

from everyone but me.

Everyone but the doctor and me, the doctor

and mortician and me.

for W

The day my child was born, I cut my hair off,

it came down to my waist, tied and twisted it

into a doll I gave her when she was strong enough

to hold a crow in each hand,
You looked

like an ampersand when you were born,
I told her,

we were under a tree, I'd been touching her toes

and saying
toe,
touching her head and saying

star,
she clutched the hair-doll and did that thing

babies do, swallow us with the wells

of their eyes, I was never real until her stare

asked me to breathe all the way to the bottom

of my life, I'd been the cloud in the picture

of the baseball team, the brown scarf no one claimed

after the party, that seemed to float there

on its own, told her,
One day we'll burn that doll,

it will brush the hour with smoke, it will mean hello

to a giant far away,
she listened like a mirror, we have

the same expression of mind on our faces, the same

shadow of wondering in our eyes, told her,
This

is air, it adores you, this is sky, it wants to be

a house, this is grass and grass is the color

of the promise I made with your mother,
or maybe

I didn't say these things but thought

I'd been falling and someone pulled the ripcord

and here I am, a leaf on the ground

Consider how smart

smart people say horses are.

I love waking

to a field of such intelligence, only pigs

more likely to go to MIT, only dew

harboring the thoughts of clouds

upon the grass and baptizing

the cuffs of my pants as I walk

among the odes. Long nose

of a thousand arrows

bound together in breath, each flank

a continent of speed, this one

quiet as a whisper

into a sock, this one

twitchy as a sleeper

dreaming the kite string

to her shadow has snapped. Old now

to my ways, they let me touch

their voltage, the bustling waves

of atoms conscripted to their form, this one

even allowing my ear to her side

so I can elope

with her heartbeat. I often feel

everything is applause, an apparition

of the surprise of existence,

that the substances of life

aren't copper and lithium, fire

and earth, but the gasp

and its equivalents, as when rain falls

on a hot road

and summer sighs. Or the poem

feels that, it's hard to tell

my mind from the poem's, the real

from the lauded horses, there's always

this dualism, this alienation

of word from word

or time from thrust

or window from greed. I am eager

to ride a horse out of the field, out of language,

out of the county

and to the sea, where whichever one of us

is the better swimmer

will take over, in case you see a horse

on the back of a man

from where you are

on your boat, looking at the horizon

in the late and dawdling company

of a small but faithful star.

When my father dies, naturally I'll want to call him

and tell him my father has died, he won't pick up, I'll decide

he's out raking leaves, that leaves are sullen, that I'm hungry,

that my father hasn't died, and when he finally answers,

I'll stand in the kitchen wondering why I called, most

of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich completed,

all that will remain is for the parts to be joined, the jelly

to the peanut butter wing, I'll tell my father

I'm cooking, he'll nod and I'll hear him nod

Small white church at the edge of my yard.

A bell will ring in a few hours.

People who believe in eternity will sing.

I'll hear an emotion resembling the sea from over a hill.

One time I sat with my back to the church to give their singing

to my spine, there's a brown llama you can watch

while you do this in a field if you'd like to try.

I don't think even calendars believe in eternity.

Beyond the church is a trail that leads to a bassinet in a tree.

Someone put it there when the oak and sky were young.

I'm afraid to climb the tree.

That I'll find bones inside.

That they'll be mine.

I want to be with my wife forever but not as we are.

She'll become a bear, I a season: Kodiak, spring.

Part of loving bagpipes haunting the gloaming is knowing

the bloodsinging will stop.

Beyond the church I pulled a hammer from the river.

What were you building,
I asked its rust,
from water and without nails?

This is where I get self-conscious about language,

words are love affairs or séances or harpoons, there isn't a sentence

that isn't a plea.

This is where I don't care that I'm half wrong when I say everything

is made entirely of light.

This is where my wife and I hold hands.

Over there is where our shadows do a better job.

About the Author

Bob Hicok's
This Clumsy Living
won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. Recipient of five Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim, and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in eight volumes of
The Best American Poetry,
including
The Best of The Best American Poetry.
This is his eighth book.

Books by Bob Hicok

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors and staff of the following magazines and websites for publishing some of the poems that appear in this book:

Copyright 2013 by Bob Hicok

All rights reserved

Cover art:
Bloodroot.
Archival Epson print on Dibond with mixed media and varnish. Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison. 2008

ISBN: 978-1-55659-436-6

eISBN: 978-1-61932-084-0

If you have enjoyed this title, please consider supporting Copper Canyon Press and our dedication to bringing the work of emerging, established, and world-renowned poets to an expanding audience through e-books:

www.coppercanyonpress.org/pages/donation.asp

To contact us with feedback about this title send
an e-mail to:

[email protected]