From: Robert Greenfield
This is as Original & Amazing a poem I've seen in quite a while! From October posting of GUERNICA Magazine. RLG The Smiths, as I understand them by Bob Hicok, October 2010 There's a box at the hospital in which to deposit children unlikely to win the Nobel Prize. They cradled their son past that box, though he'd been born with a pillow factory where his heart should have been. That first night, they took turns putting ears to his chest, listening to feathers being sorted, and wondered what kind of birds lost their lives so the blood of sleep could dream through his veins. Doves, she hoped. Roosters, his father said, surprising himself. At the school for special children, his best friend, a girl whose collar bones were the shadows of bears, kissed him somehow from the other side of the teeter-totter. The boy whose eyes were lighthouses said, now you have to get married. Twenty years later, when they did, they came back and made love on that teeter-totter, in the middle, rocking slightly up and down, though the far ends never touched the earth. Their daughter knew none of this until one day she cried because she could not tip over or fall down like the other kids at school. Her mother, while explaining the conception of the girl's incomparable balance, braided her hair into an actual swan, a black swan who made the girl feel her head was a pond on a windless day, which is what she wrote in her diary: My head is a pond on a windless day. Leading the diary to write in its diary, I didn't have the heart to tell her I felt a breeze, and in that breeze I smelled a storm, and in that storm I heard the screaming of trees, for the diary had been raised to keep its thoughts to itself, with perfect penmanship, in the belief that words are bodies who would admit, if asked, "my experience of the transcendental has always been a secondary one," but go on, still, to do the work we've asked them to, to hold everything our arms cannot. Bob Hicok's most recent book is Words for Empty and Words for Full. Readers like you make Guernica possible. Please show your support. Homepage photo by Stephcarter via Flickr Subscribe Newsletter | Twitter | Facebook | RSS Support Make a donation | Shop the store MORE Poetry The Smiths, as I understand them by Bob Hicok -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Convince Me Eternity by Lisabeth Burton -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Untitled by Roya Zarrin translated from the Persian by Kaveh Bassiri -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RECENTLY BLOGGED Guernica Celebrates 6! October 14, 2010 Kelie Montalvo: Will a New Lawsuit Filed Against the Pakistan Government Lead to Political Turmoil? October 2, 2010 Chuck Collins: Five Reasons to Let the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich Expire October 1, 2010 ELSEWHERE ON THE WEB a.. How hair affects politicans' success around the world b.. Burn, baby, burn: Climate change skeptics on the Left c.. New power couple emerges in North Korea: Kim Jong-un's aunt and uncle Advertisement a.. @2010 Guernica Magazine. b.. Masthead c.. About d.. Advertise e.. Contact [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------------------ --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[email protected]?subject=laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/laamn/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: [email protected] [email protected] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [email protected] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
