Elegy with lies
This lost person I loved. Loved for a hundred years.
When I find her. Find her in a forest. In a cabin
under smoke and clouds shaped like smoke. When I find her
and call her name (nothing) and knock (nothing)
and build a machine that believes it’s God and the machine
calls her name (nothing) and knocks (nothing).
When I tear the machine down and she runs from the cabin
pointing a gun at my memories and telling me
to leave, stranger, leave, man of hammers.
When I can’t finish that story. When I get to the gun
pointed at my head. When I want it to go off.
When everything I say to anyone all day long
is bang. That would be today. When I can’t use her name.
All day long. Soft as cotton, tender as kiss. Bang.
“Elegy with lies” by Bob Hicok, appears in Elegy Owed (2013) and is used by permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.CopperCanyonPress.org.
Hicok is an associate professor of creative writing at Virginia Tech. He is from Grand Ledge Michigan and owned an automotive die design business before he began his teaching career, first at Western Michigan University and then Virginia Tech. Read more about the book here.
