VINYL POETRY

Volume 7, February 2013

BIRDIE
Bob HicokView Contributor’s Note

Sunny, infinite chance of rain

I don’t want her to die.

She doesn’t want her mother to die.

Five minutes after we were married, her father died.

The limo drove us to the hospital.

She stood in her veil at the side of his bed.

A nurse congratulated us.

We didn’t know what words to put in our mouths
so we left our mouths empty.

I think of us as the top of a wedding cake
standing guard over the door his body had become.

She doesn’t want me to die.

The Buddha said we shouldn’t want anything but the Buddha
wanted us to believe that.

At the funeral, she wore a tricycle being pushed by her father
when she was five, her legs out to the side.

That’s only true in this poem, like the cloud I’m looking at
is only true in this sky.

In all other skies, this cloud is a lie.

It’s about to rain, not in the poem but in the thinking
that lead to the poem,
the poem that helped me recall
I can still touch her entire body,
the soft parts, hard parts, bendy parts, all the places she’ll hide
from everyone but me.

Everyone but the doctor and me, the doctor
and mortician and me.