AT THE RECEPTION
Everyone else had gone to dance
around a man and woman lifted on chairs,
into the sky of the future of their love,
when he pushed away his plate, rolled up
his white sleeve, showed me the number
on his arm and rubbed it
as if asking it to grant him
three wishes. I imagine
he would have been tempted in the camp
to mourn all of the ashes
the wind carried on its shoulders
across Poland, not knowing which
were his mother, father, sister,
had he not been so busy
dying of hunger. I wanted to listen
to the locomotive of his heart,
to go to sleep on the pillow
of his breath, and should have kissed him
on the lips like a lover
of life, or at least pulled a rose
out of my ear to show him the magic
of his survival had endured.
But I think he would have said
it wasn’t magic, it was luck,
that evil was so busy back then
it couldn’t get around to all the Jews,
no matter how hard it tried.
As I watched him shuffle away, I wondered
what normal was for him, for anyone
who’d seen human beings
become bored with cruelty
in that factory of death. Later
I saw him dancing with his cane
since he couldn’t dance with the ashes
of his wife. He’d shown me her picture.
She looked the way most people
look in photos. Plain. Happy. Alive.
—from Rattle #84, Summer 2024
__________
Bob Hicok: “I like starting poems. After I start a poem, I like getting to the middle, and after the middle, an end seems a good thing to reach. When the end is reached, I like doing everything that isn’t writing poems, until the next day, when my desk is exactly where I left it, though I am a slightly different person than the last time we met.”
