Once A Green Sky

Once a Green Sky


by Bob Hicok


A deer was on Linwood and I asked the forest
to come and retrieve her, curl its slow hammers
around our houses and decipher brick into scraps
of clay. My hardest wishes are for and against

ourselves, delicate locusts, ravenous flowers
with an appetite for even the breaths
between the spaces. Say you are alone. Pretend
everyone emulates you. Imagine if alone

the idea of the conversion van, the strong touch
of burrito wafting from the bodega, never
germinated in the cavernous brain. Hands
are no more clever than kneading dough,

the weapon of choice is sleep, the gods we adore
eat their own ribs, supplicant postures
of apology break out simultaneously in each
cabin and in exactly the same way. Impossible, okay,

move on. What if instead I owned one TV
and shared it with you on weekends, Lucille Ball
eating chocolate after chocolate as we laugh
in tribal reflex. If there was just one car

we touched the third Sunday of each month,
licked the leather seats, turned the engine
over and ran behind the bushes, terrified
at the growling dog we’d created, could this be

enough? There’s a surprise in all flesh, this
is the purpose of eyes, to find and convey shock.
The deer and I faced as mistakes of context,
errors of intention, and she shot into the same

confusion one street over, we are saints
of replication, my house is your house, my
pierced navel your erection, the deer sniffed
for the green mist, thrashed through an archipelago

of false indicators, islands of shrubs that lasted
five paces, ten breaths, until she ran
into the mouth of a Saturn. From skulls I know
the architecture of her bones, lacy nostrils,

the torsion grooves of ligaments, just as kissing
a shoulder I have faith in the cup
and ball that work the joint, making it curl
into pleasure. I can’t shrug gravity, the Holy

Spirit Force, but if possible would dream
silks of what contains us, the habit to make,
to adore the crystal chandelier
whose frail music each day is a dirge

for a hundred species. What if the forest
followed the deer, not into death but through
my living room, what if the rain ate my den
and you and I, unrolling a set of blueprints,

realized the sky is aspiration enough? Or if you
and I, reaching for a vowel, for the last
piece of coal on the stack, gave
silence, gave the eventual diamond back.


Bob Hicok
Published in Ploughshares