Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

A poem people have been reading at weddings and to those they love for 25 years

^{Sculpture by Auguste Rodin; photographed by me at the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.}

Dear Readers,

This is perhaps my most favorite poem of all time. I remember reading it 4 years ago and deciding I was going to read everything ever written by Bob Hicok. I have since read most of his poetry (he writes a lot, and is always brilliant!)

Bob Hicok, among other things, is a true master of the love poem, as you will discover in this poem and many others I’ll post here over the years.

May your heart be a lantern,

Karan

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.

---

This poem is from Plus Shipping by Bob Hicok, published by BOA Editions, Ltd., 1998.

Buy the collection here — I highly recommend it!