BOB HICOK
The question was, which of your old lovers
would you most like to meet in a bar fight?
I thought of you smashing a beer bottle
on the edge of a table into a violent bloom
of glass. Since chaos is some cousin
to how we made love, you were wearing nothing
but a slip and I was heartfelt in my nakedness.
By now you can tell none of this is true,
as I can tell you’re not really here, talking with me,
as you have not been here talking with me
for twenty-five years. See the mistake
in that sentence that isn’t a mistake, how bodies
ghost, voices vine through the dendrites,
how even withdrawn, a touch that was once love
persists as touch. Weaker, yes, by the hour,
and new fingerprints intercede,
and when I paint the ceiling today
you’ll not be with me on the ladder,
and the forty kisses I share with my wife
won’t even implicate your lips. But every time
half of you disappears, half remains, a Greek
said something about this, that the severed weed
leaves a root, to always put the top
back on the peanut butter. And though I’m not sure
what size shoe you wore or color you adored,
I feel you had a pulse, that you knew how to walk,
I sense there was a period when our lives
overlapped, when we found ourselves
in the same rooms, the same bed, inserting, holding,
licking, doing all the maintenance
couples do to pretend that skin
doesn’t end where skin ends but is the beginning
of planets and music, of everything, that’s all we want,
everything. It’s good to imagine you out there,
not thinking of but sensing me as a shadow
might feel the air through which it glides,
good to put down my fists, to no longer fight
that I will always be pregnant with you.