Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem by Bob Hicok
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think
praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what's happening,
it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics of mournful Whistlers, the audible sorrow and beta decay of Old Battersea Bridge. I like the idea of different
theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass, a Bronx where people talk like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow kind, perhaps in the nook
of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed anyone. Here I have two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back to rest my cheek against,
your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish. My hands are webbed like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed something in the womb
but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds or a life I felt passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly she had to scream out.
Here, when I say I never want to be without you, somewhere else I am saying I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you in each of the places we meet,
in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying and resurrected. When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life, in each place and forever.