The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (XXXVII)

“the world is a cup the sun fills every day”

Agony by Arshile Gorky

The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (XXXVII)

by Bob Hicok

I’ve been writing down the whispers
of a stopped clock. Waiting for the wind
to cast a shadow. Paying a detective
to find the imaginary friend
from my childhood. Filling the holes
in the gaps in the cracks
of my forgetting. Thinking the world
is a cup the sun fills every day,
even when it’s cloudy, then goes away.
The chair my father sat in to read the Bible
is full of the absence
of him doing that. Death is a hat
we look in for the head that wore it,
a picture we take in the future
of the past. If you come by for breakfast,
I’ll pour you a bowl of thorns,
so don’t. I need some time alone,
like the rest of my life.
It’s weird to me now
that we urge kids to blow
birthday candles out
when they should burn, given that our bones
are I.O.U.s. Cake sounds good,
and after cake, being older
and missing cake. If the dead
could speak, they’d tell us to start
with the dessert menu. The best thing
about my mother’s apple pie:
she was here to make it.

This poem first appeared in the New Yorker.