Words for Empty and Words for Full

Getting in line

76 Getting in line A man crosses a field. He’d like something to set down so he picks up a rock about the size of a baby. Rock-baby is heavier than a baby-baby would be, the man has walked but a few steps when he abandons the child. Years later, there’s a knock on his door in the field: rock-baby has grown up and wants to get even. The man doesn’t remember rock-baby, so when rock-baby says, you never loved me, the man says, sure, I can buy that, and offers grown-up rock-baby a beer. When they’re a little drunk, the man says, your quarrel isn’t with me, your quarrel’s with the poet who put us in the field, and the poet’s quarrel is with the God who makes poets send people walking across fields, and God’s quarrel is with the nothing that came before God that God is always trying to fill, even after God has filled it. Grown-up rock-baby thinks the man is telling him he doesn’t really exist, he stones the man to death to prove that his nonexistence is not the case. Alone with the bloody certainty of his tangibility, he writes out, again and again, “my thoughts have a city in them.” And in that city, at night, a little girl wants a goldfish for the goldfish hicok pages i-120.indd 76 1/7/10 3:23 PM 77 she already has, and the goldfish wants a little girl for the little girl he already has, and the bowl wants a bowl beside it to share the orange and rippling feeling it would call soul if the word wasn’t already taken. hicok pages i-120.indd 77 1/7/10 3:23 PM ...