William My Man
By Mary Hickman
I
A cave with arms at the mouth.
Our hero is blind: everything he hears he sees.
Hear! Gold light sifts to his ear.
A roar. The seas
beaten—his duodenum, colon,
blind intestine and appendix, destined
for heat, they blush.
II
William's cabbage heart shook.
He dragged himself from the dirt.
If he could rest his ears he could see
ginkgos in his city. The pretty boy I mean
& Will, who were both aging
with their senses curbed until they knew
New York City by the root & crack.
III
As if there is a fig tree rooted in heaven
& each of its leaves knows all the rules.
8:45 a.m. hum: he saw the boy had fallen
into a manhole & the fig tree had fallen into a manhole
& neither could be the sound of hands splitting
gold hands landed
up the breadth of William's back.
God bleeding me a kind of blooded cry
my lady makes me a heron
or my leg for a stump
the cursed in loam my
venomous thumbs my
His guts an a-readied muck.
IV
If your hand had been dusk-
yellow not a lantern but winged
—a bridge or a dove sprung
from the dirt.
Trying to make a shape. The feathered
thumb herring—
bone. We would not fall.
V
I brought you in from the garden since I can't
stand the trees' visions. William you will
be there the last
stately in ribbons.
But the vision is a fattened glee.
The glee is a clubfoot.
The glee is a mutt.
The eyes sewn up the air & nothing can be seen
but visions.
You are burst sideways like a fist in water.
Your maker staring into an apron of mud.
Thou art
bore a hole in the man.
Thou art
not a bloody bit, not the man.
Copyright Credit: Mary Hickman, "William My Man" from This Is the Homeland. Copyright © 2015 by Mary Hickman. Reprinted by permission of Ahsahta Press.
Source: This is the Homeland (Ahsahta Press, 2015)