Poetry | June 01, 2009
Poetry Feature: Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok
Featuring the poems:
- In the future, the future will be the past (featured as Poem of the Week, July 14, 2009)
- BRCA1
- Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down
- Meditations on a false spring
- From the history of the grade school
In the future, the future will be the past
A woman screamed
during the protest between supporters
of Arabs on one side and Israelis
on the other that Jews should “go back
to the ovens.” There’s a picture of her
on the web in a white scarf, mouth open, everything
slightly blurry because she was moving
or the camera was or the Earth jumped a bit
at what she said. As I looked at the picture,
Eve was behind me folding a shirt, sleeves first
and then in half and then in half again
the other way, making me glad
I’m not a shirt, she coughed and I saw her
in an oven. This wasn’t a thought
but a vision, not a Jew in an oven
but this Jew in an oven, not this Jew
in an oven but these lips, eyes, this voice
made ash. I got up and kissed her
to make sure she was there, not telling her
she’d just died in my brain,
then sat before the screen and stared
and stared again at the picture
of the woman, refreshing my gaze
at whatever rate humans do
who want to know what it feels like
to wear a particular head, to own
a different tongue. Sure that, if I could meet her,
if the crowd dispersed, if screaming
were put aside, if she sat across a table
from Eve, and saw her stirring coffee,
worrying a hair into place, and I gave this woman
paper and pencil and told her, I am a god,
you can sketch anything you want to happen
and it will happen, she wouldn’t sketch an oven
and Eve in the oven, wouldn’t draw fire
but a hill, as all children draw hills,
as all adults are children in the universe
in which I am a god, a hill with a view
of other wavings from other hills-
these are examples of the thoughts
I have of people, as these are examples of questions
I ask the falling snow: if I could burn a sock
could I burn a foot, if a foot a finger, if a finger
an ear, if an ear a womb, could I ever burn
a womb, snow, in your opinion,
how did we get here?
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