A country mapped with invisible ink

– Bob Hicok

Like we are the hole that grows in poor, unmendable

nothing: we blind needles: we unmoored threads:

like feeling I’m the enaction of a waterfall by my tongue

.

upon your body, as when a boat is brought to the edge

of exile and a hand extends to a hand or a tree

beseeches with its shadeshawl: however born,

.

there is reaching, we agree the wind smelled of copper

one day, a passport the next: like how to escape

my brain’s slum of words, the ghetto of the said,

.

while adoring there the rocks, the teacups,

if half of me is a Molotov cocktail and half

the inflection of loss and half a genuflection

.

to breath: like wondering if this extra half

is a country mapped with invisible ink:

like how windows ask to come along with the going

.

and preside over the staying, and I look at them

with all the love, all the shatter I can muster:

shards cutting me when I try to put the sky,

.

the distance back together: boredom cutting me

deeper when I don’t: like searching for a man

in a burning house and finding a piano as echo flees:

.

a whetstone still warm from the blade: sheets pressed

with brainfolds of sleep: a whisper from the bathroom

of running water: but no body: and I carry

.

these things to safety that are not the man: the piano

in my arms, running water in my mouth, the vespers

of sleep, the knife, so like a wing, like flight:

.

and say of him, that was me, to the ashes, the char:

and sift the memory of flames for their sorrow,

holding smoke to the mirror interested only

.

in solid dreams: like it will finally see

what isn’t there and give it my face, this presence

of absence I have tried and tried not to be

**********

“almost as if I’m making her and this poem and my past

up as I go, to help me feel nothing

.

goes to waste, not even waste.”

-also Bob Hicok