The Hole
- The Hole
The winter his wife died he said there’s a hole in the world.Yet a hole does not scare.Let hole stay as it is. And where.Not repair.Does a hole grow hair? Smudge at the marginslike a charcoal drawing?Does hole have walls? Echo like a cave?Is hole heated?Can he live there in some comfort?How does one tend a hole?Flush it out with a garden hose?Cold water? Or warm?What if all its densities thinnedand hole were to become elegant as a pencil.A hole to be wished for. Courted even.Can hole widen or narrow?Make funny faces. Sing like a canary.Can hole count?Reckon the sum of its own absence?Does hole have a belly.Can hole eat around its own edges.Take a stance on religious questions.Is hole a hole forever.Or does it change with chance? With the weather?Whenever it damn well feels like it.Can hole dance? Can it reason?Is hole risqué? Or decent?Does hole believe in God. Is hole God.Does it scream. Dream.Think holy or unholy thoughts.Is hole honest?Wholly authentic?Sometimes he speaks to it. Sometimes hole listens.Sometimes hole talks back. [End Page 36]
Becky Gould Gibson is a poet living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She has had work published in journals, anthologies, two chapbooks, and four full-length collections: First Life (Emrys Press, 1997), Need-Fire (Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Contest, 2007), and Heading Home (Main Street Rag, Lena Shull Book Contest, 2014). “The Xanthippe Fragments,” thirty-eight poems spoken by the wife of Socrates before her husband’s death, is to appear from St. Andrews University Press in 2016. Until her retirement in 2008, Becky taught writing, literature, and Women’s Studies at Guilford College.
