Words for Empty and Words for Full

Watchful

31 Watchful A wasp had built a nest outside the backdoor. Every time I went to knock it down, the wasp was working the chambers. I waited two days, finally turned off the water while doing dishes, picked up a knife, went out and cut the nest free of the doorframe, where it hung by little more than a thread of wood the wasp had chewed to pulp. The wasp was there, flew off, and was back, on the fallen nest, just now, when I checked after typing “working the chambers.” It started to walk away, the morning too cold for flight, when I knelt to pick up the nest. In each of the open chambers, a grayish dot that will become a larva, then a pupa, then a wasp who builds nests for grayish dots. Two of the chambers were sealed. I moved the nest to the top of a plastic box enclosing telephone wires on the side of the house— brightly colored wires with white stripes running their length, wires of the human voice— scooped the wasp onto a long, rusted hinge that has sat for months on the porch railing, placed the wasp on the nest, and came back to tell you this is the poem I’ve been trying to write about the man I stood beside during the national anthem at a ballgame, who placed his prosthetic hand over his heart, looking more like a boy from the outside, where I was, and sang, in his uniform, harder than I ever have, without a sense of irony. Though how he would do that, or what the inflections of irony are, I don’t know, or if it was two hands—a prosthetic, a phantom, hicok pages i-120.indd 31 1/7/10 3:23 PM 32 a grip, a ghost—over his heart, a memory of his hand, his life, our country as it was, whole, possible. I’ve wondered every day since, like when the wasp was there, just now, as if nothing had changed, when everything had changed. Thinking of his hand as a phantom, just as the reasons for the war in Iraq are phantoms. His hand a flame as the burning of a Humvee is a torch. The sense that we should not, who haven’t been there, speak of nails, bullets flying. Of war itself, this severing itself. A piece of shop window, even a rib blown free, ripping through the séance of his flesh, the mood of his flesh to know and to hold. That I should not, who has not been there, speak of this. But you see how I start to. That a space is opened by his hand, absence creating absence, and I have to fill it, it’s what I do— this isn’t an ars poetica—it’s what we do, all we do, essentially, that dogs do not, butterflies do not: see a thing and draw it to another thing, make them clash and kiss, knit, gather. His brain too is doing this. Fusing. Making a kind of metaphor of sensation. His face, when he smiles, when a breeze strokes, triggers the life of his hand, for these encodings dwell beside each other in the cortex— what the hand feels, what the face feels. And since his hand is gone, and no sensations arrive to this region, to this love, his face is taking it over, telling his mind, This equals this. Probably. Truth is I don’t know. We didn’t speak, the man and I, of the ballgame, the weather, his hand. Crack of the bat, blue sky, hotdogs that smell at the ballpark like they smell nowhere else. Perhaps he feels no haunting, no ghost reaching for the butter knife, no itch hicok pages i-120.indd 32 1/7/10 3:23 PM 33 that isn’t there being there, persistent as air. Perhaps he would be Shiva for this war, acquire more limbs to “lose” or “give,” horrible words that suggest misplaced keys or wrapped boxes under tinseled trees. In an earlier version of this poem, I used his hand as an excuse to write This equals this: I’m a phantom of the body politic if I don’t speak, I’m required to, freedom’s a tended dream, a public mapping of belief. When we’re silent, government flows into the spaces...