489: Backward Poem
"Backward Poem"
Bob Hicok
The poem ends in death so I’ll walk it
backward home. The heart of an 87 year-old woman
starts on July 7th and immediately doctors
syringe morphine from her veins
and her daughter puts a tissue
together and steps from the room. There’s
a general turning from dark to light
and what she said to grandchildren
then she says to grandchildren now
only the words face the other way and blood
removes itself from scraped knees and all
her photographs resolve to black
as she lowers the camera from her eye
and sleeps it back into the box. She waves
as if erasing the sky amid the turned-around
hissing of the ocean and the elated
leaves retrieve their green and jump
into the trees and sex culminates with something
like warm proximity, a simple radiant fact.
Remembering her body old, she frets
the evaporation of liver spots
and tightening of skin, interrogates the mirror
as gravity gives the curves back and begins
her first date with my grandfather
operating a quick stranger’s stride.
And soon I’ll send the poem the other way and soon
she’ll turn soft in bed as my mother shreds a blue
and powdery thing into finer dust
and just before the inevitable
I’ll write a baby seeing the sky for the first time
floats with antecedent, which naturally molts
to the last wind to touch the body
is all the body becomes. If time’s
no more than the flesh of space arching its back, what’s
to stop the limber words from making geraniums
bloom in winter, what’s to bind
my grandmother to an oath of death?
I declare her young now and leaning on a sill with color
supplying the field, throats of the flowers open
to the pilgrimage of bees, the sun
dead above hoarding the shadows for itself.
How do you show poetry to someone who hates it?
Bob Hicok
The poem ends in death so I’ll walk it
backward home. The heart of an 87 year-old woman
starts on July 7th and immediately doctors
syringe morphine from her veins
and her daughter puts a tissue
together and steps from the room. There’s
a general turning from dark to light
and what she said to grandchildren
then she says to grandchildren now
only the words face the other way and blood
removes itself from scraped knees and all
her photographs resolve to black
as she lowers the camera from her eye
and sleeps it back into the box. She waves
as if erasing the sky amid the turned-around
hissing of the ocean and the elated
leaves retrieve their green and jump
into the trees and sex culminates with something
like warm proximity, a simple radiant fact.
Remembering her body old, she frets
the evaporation of liver spots
and tightening of skin, interrogates the mirror
as gravity gives the curves back and begins
her first date with my grandfather
operating a quick stranger’s stride.
And soon I’ll send the poem the other way and soon
she’ll turn soft in bed as my mother shreds a blue
and powdery thing into finer dust
and just before the inevitable
I’ll write a baby seeing the sky for the first time
floats with antecedent, which naturally molts
to the last wind to touch the body
is all the body becomes. If time’s
no more than the flesh of space arching its back, what’s
to stop the limber words from making geraniums
bloom in winter, what’s to bind
my grandmother to an oath of death?
I declare her young now and leaning on a sill with color
supplying the field, throats of the flowers open
to the pilgrimage of bees, the sun
dead above hoarding the shadows for itself.
How do you show poetry to someone who hates it?