Words for Empty and Words for Full by Bob Hicok

Author:Bob Hicok
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780822990932
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Between us

—for BN

X is pregnant and wants to keep it

but can’t, but can, but can’t. I should put it

in quotes but that causes more problems

than solves. I’m not the father,

if you’re wondering. And she’s young

but not crazy young, not overcome

by the moment, first time, back of the car,

isn’t beer wonderful young. So I think

she wanted to get pregnant, since condoms exist,

and convenience stores with their shelves

for condoms, and either she could’ve bought them

or he could’ve, together they could’ve engaged

in prophylactic foreplay. This is certainly not

an articulated desire, as it wasn’t for me

and my girlfriend twenty-five years ago,

when there were also condoms and we didn’t use them,

also diaphragms. I never could have said to her

that it was exciting to screw unwrapped,

to feel the possibility of a child in rut,

I barely recognized a wish that ran deep

as protein chains, as lung and sinew.

But when she got pregnant, the desire

to not have the child was stronger,

I should have been rip-sawed by my contradictions.

The maple outside my writing window’s

coming into leaf, it’s bud-sprinkled still

but they’re opening, they’re not recognizable

yet as leaves but palpably broadening

and insistent. My girlfriend got pregnant

twice and I learned the extent to which

I’m no more sophisticated than this tree—one

abortion, one miscarriage—the extent to which

the me I think of as me—word & memory me,

love of rivers, tapioca, Tom Waits me—shadows

wave me, thrust me, blood me, and what

thrust me wants, what blood me needs

is more, to make more, to extend, persist.

The cock will trick us, the womb seduce us

into serving the only reason they exist.

This woman is Catholic and wants to be a mother.

Anything she does now will be wrong,

from her perspective: there’s no clear

choice, no right choice. The child

is not wanted, is not a child

but a fetus, the fetus is wanted

but not now. The fetus is not a child,

is not a dream, though she dreams of rain

in her womb. The pill is not one pill

but two pills, the child is not a child

but a fetus, is not wanted now, is wanted later,

when it will be a different fetus

not a child and then a child. She dreams

of bones in her underwear drawer, fingers

and jaw. She dreams of hyacinth

flowing from the tap into cupped hands.

She calls the father and says,

what were we thinking? She calls the father

and says nothing, breath on the line. I remember

holding my girlfriend’s hand as she was made

a woman no longer pregnant, as the jar

was taken away by a nurse

whose shoes squeaked. I thought of basketball,

ten pairs of squeaking shoes,

which made me think of horse, a game my girlfriend

and I liked to play, which made me think

of the roan she and I petted that summer

in a field we wanted to make love in.

We didn’t have any rubbers and I said,

does it matter, she said, I don’t know

and kept kissing where she was kissing

as I kept undoing everything

but her skin. Later, she said she’d watched

the horse watch as if we were grass

in wind or birds that had landed near the life

it had no idea it was living

and felt that directness as

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