Poem 8 - Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

I have enjoyed this poem for a long, long time. I’ve read it so many times, I’ve memorized parts of it. I love its pacing, its line breaks, and its overall pensive feel. It’s also a love poem, but not a traditional one.

Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

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.